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THORNDALE; 



THE CONFLICT OF OPINIONS. 



THORNDALE ; 



THE CONFLICT OF OPINIONS, 



By WILLIAM SMITH, 

AUTHOR OF "ATHELWOLD, A DRAMA;" "a DISCOURSE ON ETHICS," ETC. 



" Sleeps the future, like a snake enrolled, 
Coil within coil." 

Wordsworth. 



BOSTON: 
TICKNOR AND FIELDS 

H DCCC LIX. 






RIVEESIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
PRINTED BY H. 0- HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 
INTRODUCTION 1 



BOOK I. 

THE LAST RETREAT. 
CHAP. 

I. THE SELF-REVIEW 15 

II. TRUISMS 25 

III. FRAGMENTS ON THE SENTIMENT OF BEAUTY 31 

IV. THE TWO FUTURITIES 39 

V. THE FUTURE LIFE 48 

VI. THE FUTURE SOCIETY 53 



BOOK II. 
THE RETROSPECT. 

I. CHILDHOOD 65 

IL THE STUDENT 73 

III. THE MIRAGE 86 

IV. THE MOTH AND THE FLAME Ill 

V. THE WANDERER 117 

VI. MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER 127 

VII. REMINISCENCES OF CLARENCE — RETURN TO ENGLAND.. 144 

VIII. LUXMORE THE POET 150 

IX. A poet's MEMORANDA 162 

X. CONCLUSION BY THORNDALE OF HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 

SKETCH 169 



CONTKNTS. 



BOOK III. 

cykil; or, the modern Cistercian, 

chap. page 

I. THE CISTERCIAN MONK 177 

II. A VISIT TO THE MONASTERY 187 

III. A MENTAL CONFLICT 193 

IV. THE INTERVIEW AT BARMOUTH 205 

V. VISITS FROM THE CISTERCIAN 213 



BOOK IV. 

seckendorf; or, the spirit of denial. 

I. INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF HIS ATTACK ON CLAR- 
ENCE'S UTOPIA 225 

IL THE SILVER SHILLING 240 

III. THE WORLD AS IT IS — OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. .. . 248 

IV. THE INN ON THE RIGHI — SECKENDORF RECOUNTS AN IN- 

CIDENT IN HIS OWN BIOGRAPHY 259 

V. SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS, AND THE 

LIMITS TO MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PROGRESS 270 

VI. LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF — DESULTORY CONVERSA- 
TION ON THE ANIMAL CREATION AND ON MAN 294 

VII. THE DIARY CONTINUED — THE WATERS ARE DISTURBED 319 



BOOK V. 

clarence; or, the UTOPIAN. 

I. A NEW INTRODUCTION TO AN OLD FRIEND 337 

II. JULIA MONTINI. 344 

III. CLARENCE IS STILL THE UTOPIAN .358 



CONTENTS. 



THE CONFESSION OF FAITH OF AN ECLECTIC AND UTOPIAN 
PHILOSOPHER. A.D. 1850. 

PAGE 
INTRODUCTION ; — THIS CREATION OF NATURE AND MAN 

A PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE 

IDEA 365-382 

Idea of Progi-ess, 369.— The Argument for the Existence of God, 373.— 
Division of our Subject, 382. 



PART L 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS 383-450 

Section I. General Statement, 384. — II. A Sensation felt in Space the 
simplest Element or State of Consciousness, 388. — III. Touch, 392. — 
IV. Vision, 394.— V. Memory, 398.— VI. Imagination, 402.— VIL As- 
sociation of Ideas, 404. — VIII. Pain, Pleasure, Passion, Appetite, Sen- 
sibilities that immediately induce movement, 406.— IX. The Will, 408. 
— X. Personal Identity; the Self or the Ego, 411. — XI. Progressive 
Development; new Knowledge, new Sentiments, 417. — XII. Law; 
Punishment, 422.— XIII. The Moral Sentiments, 424.— XIV. Material 
or Immaterial? Final Reference of all things to the Divine Idea, to 
the Divine Power or Being, 429. 



PART IL 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY 451-544 

Section I. Preliminaries, 451. — II. Ancient Civilization, 459. — HI. Prog- 
ress of Industry and of Industrial Organization; Era of Slavery, 464. 
— IV. Era of Wages, 469. — V. Era of Partnership; or. Some Consid- 
erations on the Effect likely to be produced by Increased Abundance 
and Increased Intelligence; the good of some social whole, not the 
Principle of Equality, our true Moral Guidance, 477. — VI. Progress in, 
and through. Religion, 488. — VII. Effect of early religious Faiths on 
Laws and Government, 495. — VIII. Nature-worship; the personal 
God, 499.— IX. God of Terror ; God of Justice ; God of Love, 503.— 
X. Intellectual or Scientific Progress, 513.— XL The Scientific Method 
of Thought applied to Society, 517. — XII. Education of the People, 
522.— XIII. Science and Religion, 526. 

CONCLUSION 538 



INTRODUCTION. 



Every tourist knows the grotto of Posillpo, and the heights 
above it, and how from these heights the spectator commands, 
to great advantage, the celebrated view of the Bay of Naples. 
From this elevated spot he has VcwSuvius and Sorrento to the 
left of him ; the shores of Baiee lie upon the right ; whilst before 
him the islands of Capri and Ischia, seen in the distance, break 
and relieve the wide expanse and deep azure of the sea. To 
these islands the peculiar charm of the view is greatly indebted, 
for they give here to the ocean something of the peace and 
serenity of the lake, without much detracting from its own char- 
acteristics of amplitude and infinity. But it is not altogether for 
the sake of the prospect that we would conduct the reader in 
imagination up Mount Posilipo. If, as he approaches the sum- 
mit of the hill, he should diverge towards the left by a private 
carriage-road of a very unobtrusive appearance, he would find 
himself introduced to a little villa standing on its terrace quite 
apart from the rest of the world, and looking sheer over the 
beautiful expanse of waters, with all its islands and its moun- 
tains. Its lower rooms are shaded from the too bright sun by a 
colonnade, the pillars of which are half overgrown by myrtle and 
roses. The interspaces of the pillars are occupied by vases and a 
few statues, the almost invariable ornaments of the Italian villa. 
There it stands — so elevated and yet so secluded — on a solitary 
platform, from which the rock descends in a steep escarpment. 
Yet the name it bears. Villa Scarpa, has no reference, as might 
perhaps be supposed, to this pecuharity of position. The name 
was derived from its builder and first occupant, Signor or Dot- 
1 



2 INTRODUCTION. 

tore Scarpa, a celebrated physician of his day, who retired here 
to enjoy, in peace and study, the concluding years of his life. 

This Villa Scarpa was also lately the retreat of one who had 
indeed no celebrity to boast, but who came here for the same 
purpose, — one Charles Thorndale, who, still young, but stricken 
with consumption, had selected this spot in which to pass the 
brief residue of his days. 

In the course of a Continental tour, made when he was still in 
perfect health, Thorndale had seen and been charmed with this 
spot. The project had even then occurred to him to live here, 
completely retired from the world ; but he was not at that time 
ripe for so desperate a resolution. When, however, he became 
seriously ill, and the usual advice was given to try the climate of 
Italy, and he heard, moreover, that Villa Scarpa was to let, his 
decision was formed at once. He lost no time in securing his 
prize. Where could he better " look his last " than here ? And 
as to the extreme seclusion in which he should live, this could 
now surely be borne. He need not fear that his heart would 
sink through any pusillanimity, for the term of his solitary ban- 
ishment would be very short, and there was no hope, or enter- 
prise, to beckon him back into the arena of active life ; and in 
the little time left there was so much to think of, — a whole world 
of thoughts still to be put in order, and all the fruitless, fascinat- 
ing speculations of philosophy to be reviewed once more, before 
they were parted with for ever. 

It is a spot, one would say, in which it would be very hard to 
part with this divine faculty of thought. It seems made for the 
very spirit of meditation. The little platform on which the villa 
stands is so situated, that, while it commands the most extensive 
prospect imaginable, it is itself entirely sheltered from observa- 
tion. No house of any kind overlooks it ; from no road is it 
visible; not a sound from the neighbouring city ascends to it. 
From one part of the parapet that bounds the terrace, you may 
sometimes catch sight of a swarthy bare-legged fisherman, saun- 
tering on the beach, or lying at full length in the sun. It is the 
only specimen of humanity you are likely to behold ; you live 
solely in the eye of nature. It is with difficulty you can believe 
that, within the space of an hour, you may, if you choose it, be 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

elbowing your way, jostled and stunned, amongst the swarming 
population of Naples, — surely the noisiest hive of human beings 
anywhere to be found on the face of the earth. Here, on these 
heights, is perfect stillness, with perfect beauty. What voices 
come to you come from the upper air, — the winds and the melody 
of birds ; and not unfrequently the graceful sea-gull utters its short 
plaintive cry, as it wheels round and back to its own ocean fields. 
And then that glorious silent picture for ever open to the eye ! — 
Picture ! you hastily retract the word. It is no dead picture, — 
it is the living spirit of the universe manifesting itself, in glorious 
vision, to the eye and the soul of man. * 

Thorndale did not long enjoy this exquisite retreat. He had 
brought his sentence wuth him. The pulmonary disease which 
was his excuse, rather than his motive, for quitting England, was 
of too decided a character to be checked by change of climate. 
This he knew ; he allowed others to talk of the medicinal virtues 
of the air of Italy, he thought only of his beautiful solitude on 
Mount Posilipo. 

Though of studious habits, Thorndale had not followed any of 
the learned professions. Neither of them had attracted him as a 
pursuit, or kindled his ambition. Wealth he did not desire ; and 
that modest sufhciency which supplies the wants of a studious 
man, he, fortunately or unfortunately, had inherited. Some pro- 
ject of authorship is the usual resource of this class of meditative 
idlers ; and a book to be written, which should contain the results 
of all his cogitations upon those great problems of human life and 
the soul of man, which had chiefly occupied his attention, and 
which vex us all more or less, was a scheme which he carried 
about with him for several years. And indeed the book was 
written ; the mischief was, that it was written two or three times 
over. It was written and destroyed, and again resumed ; for no 
sooner was the philosophical manuscript completed, than new 
views arose, or old doubts revived ; there was this to be added, 
and that to be expunged, and this other to be modified ; so that 
finally, after much toil and infinite blotting of paper, nothing was 
accomplished — self-confidence was lost — and the task had been 
at length thrown aside in despair. 

Nevertheless, in his retreat at Villa Scarpa, the " habit of the 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

pen," as he has called it, was not entirely laid aside. There 
might have been always seen, as we have been told, lying on his 
table amongst other books, one of those solid manuscript volumes 
which students or authors not unfrequently have at hand, either 
to serve as a commonplace-book, or else for the purpose of jot- 
ting down any stray thoughts of their own which they fear may 
not come again when wanted. In such a volume it was the 
amusement of our much meditative recluse to write down such re- 
flections as were stirring in his mind. The book became, in fact, 
the general receptacle for any thing that interested him at the 
time. If his thoughts recurred to the past, it took the form of an 
autobiography. Page after page would at other times be occu- 
pied in recalling the conversation, or analyzing the opinions, of 
some remembered friend. It was diary, it was essay, it was 
memoir, as the occasion demanded, or the humour prompted. 

It is precisely this manuscript volume, note-book, memoir, 
diary, whatever it should be called, which we have to present to 
the reader. In it Thorndale, though apparently with little of set 
purpose or design, gives us a description of himself and of several 
friends, or rather sketches out their opinions and modes of think- 
ing. Amongst these, two may be at once particularly mentioned, 
— Clarence, who might be called a representative of the philoso- 
phy of Hope ; and Seckendorf, his complete contrast, and who, 
especially on the subject of Human Progress, takes the side of 
denial or of cavil. 

We shall not at present go farther into the nature of this man- 
uscript volume ; but we must again briefly revert to the author 
of it, and add a few words (as a faithful editor should do) upon 
the manner in which it came into our possession. 

We were at one time personally acquainted with Thorndale ; 
not intimately indeed, but as well as, without being an intimate 
friend, one could know a person of his shy and retiring habits, 
for he had always lived much in seclusion. This mode of life, 
however, had not embittered his temper. Reserved he might be, 
but he had notwithstanding grown up kind and gentle, ready at 
all times to render to others what trifling services lay in his 
power. You could not do otherwise than feel some affection for 
him, and still more interest and curiosity about him. But whether 



INTKODUCTION. 5 

from languid health, or this too much seclusion, or from the un- 
satisfactory nature of his philosophical speculations, or from all 
these conjoined, there was so cold a shadow of melancholy, so 
settled a despondency hanging over him, as rendered the interest 
you felt of a somewhat painful character ; and, on the whole, you 
were rather pleased that you had known, and had the opportu- 
nity of observing such a man, than solicitous for his frequent 
companionship. That noble sorrow which falls occasionally on 
every sincere inquirer who finds himself baffled in his search for 
truth, had taken up a very constant position in his mind. There 
was nothing to dislodge it. He had no personal ambition, no do- 
mestic bonds, no duties, no cares. Life had no interest, if philos- 
ophy could yield no truth. 

At the time we were thrown into his society, the disease which 
proved fatal to him had not decidedly manifested itself, but there 
was another disease of which the symptoms were already appar- 
ent enough — that painful weariness which results from the ab- 
sence of any active purpose or leading passion of existence. 
Perhaps the only strong desire he had was this, of penetrating to 
certain great truths which seemed to lie just hidden from our 
sight. He walked like a shadow amongst us. Whether any 
personal passion had, at some previous time, stirred his bosom, 
we were not then sufficiently acquainted with his history to say ; 
but it was plain that there was at least vitality enough left in the 
man to make this absence of all passion or motive, whether of 
ambition or love, itself a terrible calamity. A vacuum in phy- 
sics is but another name for a crushing pressure from without ; 
and the analogy holds good if we apply the term to the human 
being. When there is nothing within the bosom to buoy it up, 
the mere air we breathe, the common environments of life, be- 
come an intolerable pressure. 

We had lost sight of Thorndale, and only learnt through others, 
first of his illness, then of his departure from England, and finally 
that the sad and unobtrusive current of hils life' had altogether 
ceased to flow, when a mere accident brought us to the spot 
which had been his last and chosen retreat, and led to the dis- 
covery of the manuscript which we have here to present to the 
reader. 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

Like other tourists, we went to Naples to see its celebrated 
scenery, and in our walks in the neighbourhood we did as other 
tourists have probably done — we lost our way. Those who are 
familiar with the place will doubtless wonder how it was that, on 
our first search after the picturesque, we contrived to involve our- 
selves in the perplexify we did ; but so it was, that having 
ascended Mount Posilipo for the view which it promised, we 
found ourselves toiling along certain narrow paths or lanes, a 
high stone wall on each side of us, a white, gritty, glaring sand 
under our feet, a scorching sun above our head, and for all our 
prospect one narrow strip of blue unvaried sky. They were the 
garden walls, we presume, of the several contiguous villas be- 
tween which we were thus penned in. Emerging from this 
embarrassment, we struck desperately into a by-road, which, 
though it had not the aspect of a public thoroughfare, appeared 
at least to lead towards the Bay. It led us to the terrace, and 
the little villa, which we have done our best to describe. At 
first we hesitated to advance, but, on glancing around, it became 
pretty evident that the place was uninhabited. The flowers 
were straggling over the path, and the gate was not only wide 
open, but a little embankment of dirt and dead leaves had been 
allowed to collect against it, which prevented it from closing. 
Assured by these signs of abandonment, we crossed the terrace, 
and, leaning on the parapet, enjoyed in undisturbed quiet the 
view we had been in quest of. 

Having satiated our eyes with the prospect, we turned towards 
the villa itself. We paced to and fro its narrow colonnade, and 
paused before a mystic statue of Isis which seemed to guard the 
entrance. It was a copy, we believe, of one of several statues 
of that goddess which may be seen in the Museum of Naples. 
It arrested our steps, and held us fascinated before it. To us it 
has always appeared that the pagan sculptor has embodied in 
this later ideal of Nature a far more profound sentiment than can 
be traced in any of the earlier and more celebrated statues of 
either god or goddess. The veil of Isis is withdrawn from the 
face, but only to reveal a deeper mystery in the expression — 
eternal silence and an incommunicable thought. It is the " open 
secret " expressed in the marble. Turning from the statue, and 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

noticing that the door of the house was partly open, we ventured 
to penetrate within. From the window of the apartment we had 
now entered, we were struck with a new and quite magical effect 
of the landscape. Seen from this shaded recess, the Bay with 
all its waters, its islands, and its mountain shores, seemed no 
longer to rest upon the earth at all, but to be lifted up and poised 
like the clouds midway to heaven — rather itself a veritable 
heaven. One suddenly transported there might have been ex- 
cused for believing that he had been carried up into some celes- 
tial region. What happy mortal was it, we said to ourselves, 
who last enjoyed this peaceful retreat from our noisy and quar- 
relsome world ? Who, we wondered, was the latest tenant of 
this enviable abode ? Was it his chief delight to stand with rap- 
tured gaze at this window, which seems to look at once into 
heaven ? Or did he often pause, musing with folded arms before 
that mysterious statue of Isis, and think how Nature, like it, up- 
lifts her veil to us in vain ? What were his meditations, as he 
watched, evening after evening, the sun go down upon these 
waters, and the stars come out in this spacious firmament ? Did 
he follow in thought the sinking luminary, his spirit sinking with 
it ; or did the soaring mind claim a new home for itself amidst 
the eternal stars ? Then we naturally looked around the room 
in search of some trace of this last inhabitant, some book or pic- 
ture which might tell of his tastes or sentiments. But nothing 
of the kind was to be seen ; the walls were bare, and the whole 
furniture was arranged in that naked comfortless symmetry which 
betokens the untenanted house. The library table was thrust 
close against the wall, and not a single book upon it. 

But underneath this library table there stood a box, which we 
thought we had somewhere -seen before. It was a dispatch-box, 
of rather antique and peculiar form. Surely we had seen this 
box in a friend's hand. We drew it from its place. There was 
a brass plate on the lid, and on the brass plate was legibly en- 
graved the name of " Charles Thorndale." It was his old trav- 
elHng companion, and always held his papers and a small writing- 
desk. And now we called to mind that " Villa Scarpa " — a name 
we had seen, without paying heed to it, on one of the pillars at 
the entrance — was the very address which had been given to us 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

of Tliorndale's last residence. The question we had been put- 
ting to ourselves in mere idle curiosity, was answered in a far 
more distinct and thrilling manner than we could possibly have 
anticipated. 

It was he, then, our perplexed and meditative friend, who had 
last brought to this scene that living mind which " half creates " 
the beauty it beholds, and which even in that beauty iSnds re- 
flected the mystery of its own being. We saw his slender form 
rise up in imagination before us, — his slight tall figure, his pallid 
cheek, his beaming eye. It was not that eye of which it is so 
often said that it looks through you, for it rather seemed to be 
looking out beyond you. The object at which it gazed became 
the half-forgotten centre round which the eddying stream of 
thought was flowing ; and you stood there, like some islet in a 
river which is encircled on all sides by the swift and silent flood. 
It was Thorndale, then, who at this window had sate alone hour 
after hour ; it was he who had leant on yonder parapet, and, 
hinfflelf unseen, surveyed all this world of beauty ; it was he 
who, evening after evening, had paused beneath this colonnade 
to watch the sun go down upon the waters ; it was for him the 
moon had risen, and thrown its light upon the brow of that mys- 
tic statue of Isis, — alas ! not needful to him as a memento of the 
inscrutable. . It has often seemed to us that the light of the moon, 
while it sheds repose and slumber upon tree and flower, wakes 
the sculptured marble into all but conscious life. We could 
imagine him standing opposite this beautiful mute oracle, vexing 
it, or his own soul, for some solution to the problem of human 
destiny, and of this infinite universe ! As we knew him, he was 
one of those who cannot rest a moment in denial, and who yet 
find preeminently 

" hoAv difficult it is to keep 
Heights which the soul is competent to gain." 

His foothold was for ever giving way ; he rose only to fall again, 
— but, in falling, his eye was still, and for ever, fixed upon the 
summit. 

In what conclusion did he finally rest? What fate did he 
prophesy to the individual human soul, or to congregated hu- 
manity ? Heaven, or Utopia, or both ? Or did he to the last 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

continue to doubt, to hope, to aspire, and then again throw away 
his aspirations ? — say rather give them away to some other and 
happier mind, and still see and love them there, though he could 
not retain them for himself? As he stood gazing out upon this 
scene, was his spirit preparing to wing its way to regions still 
more beautiful, where change and death shall be no more — 
where eternity, and not time, shall give the law to our being, 
and to all being that surrounds us ? Or did he lean to the con- 
clusion that it was too bold a thing to call the individual man 
eternal — that he, Thorndale, might in one sense pass away, but 
that these thoughts he had, this his consciousness (God's great- 
est creation here below), would be revived, perpetuated, and 
repeated with more complete development, in successive genera- 
tions — that one day a city of Naples would be built upon these 
shores, which would be inhabited by men worthy of their beauty, 
and that thus our hopes of heaven would be, to a certain extent, 
realized on earth ? 

Whilst occupied with these conjectures and reminiscence^ the 
blood was suddenly summoned into our cheeks, for the door 
opened, and we were caught with his despatch-box before us, 
seated in a room we had no excuse for intruding into. He who 
now entered was evidently in his own domain. It was the pro- 
prietor of the house, who had been there in an earlier part of 
the day (which accounted for the door having been left open), 
and who now returned to complete some examination he had 
been making into the state of his premises. We felt like a 
culprit caught in the very act, and hastened to make the best 
apology we could. The polite Italian assured us that no apology 
was necessary — " Would we see the rest of the house ? It was 
vacant," he said, " and he was in want of a tenant." He added, 
that he feared it would be empty for some time, unless he could 
find some Englishman to take it ; for the last occupant had died 
of consumption, and his own countrymen had the conviction that 
that malady was contagious. He then proceeded to assure us 
that every particle of the furniture which could be supposed to 
harbour infection had been destroyed, and that even the couch 
on which Signor Thorndale had been in the habit of sitting dur- 
ing the day, had been committed to the flames. 
1* 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

Observing that his eye fell as he was speaking, on the box, 
which we had dragged from its place, and whose position might 
accuse us at least of an unwarrantable curiosity, we did not fail 
to mention the information it had so singularly conveyed to us. 
We added, in a jesting tone, that our examination had gone no 
farther than the outside of it. Our courteous host replied with 
a smile that we were quite welcome to examine its contents also. 
" The box," he said, " was not discovered till after Signor Thorn- 
dale's servant had returned to England ; I had therefore no means 
of restoring it to any of his friends. There was, indeed, nothing 
in it but one bulky manuscript volume, which lies there in it now, 
and which my servant was about to destroy to light the fires with. 
I checked him, for I recognized in it the book I used to see lying 
upon his table whenever I had occasion to call upon him, and in 
which it was evidently his habit to write. I was reluctant that 
it should be thus destroyed, for your countryman had a gentle- 
ness of manner which won even upon a stranger, — even upon a 
perj^xed landlord. Since you were personally known to him, 
I could not do better than give the relic into your custody, if you 
are willing to take charge of it." 

We expressed our willingness, and our thanks. 

"I cannot read your language," continued the Italian, "or I 
should have been tempted to look into the manuscript myself. 
Who knows," he said, laughingly, "what philosophical revela- 
tions he may thus have bequeathed ' to the First Finder ?' For, 
judging by the manner in which it was stowed away, — in the roof 
of the house, no doubt by his own hands, — it was intended as a gift 
to the first discoverer. It is told of a certain monk, who lived long 
before the Reformation broke out, and who had found his way to 
heresy without the help of Martin Luther, that, not venturing to 
breathe aloud into any living ear his anti-papal and treasonable 
doctrines, he wrote them on parchment, and, sealing up the peril- 
ous record, hid it in the massive walls of his monastery. There 
was no friend or brother to whom he could intrust his secret or 
pour forth his soul ; and it was some consolation to imagine that 
in a future age (for even monastic walls must one day fall) some 
one would read the parchment, and know ' that he also had been 
thinking.' " 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

Anticii^ating the application of the story, we replied — " that 
Thorndale could have no motive for walling up any of his lucu- 
brations. But he was irresolute by temperament, and not being 
able to decide whether to destroy or to preserve the manuscript, 
he had evidently left its fate to be determined by chance, or, as 
you say, gave it to the first finder. As such, we consider your 
title to be fully established, and ours through you." 

" Oh, you should take the box as well ! " exclaimed the good- 
natured Italian, seeing that, having thanked him for his gift, we 
were putting the book under our arm. Accordingly, after some 
farther conversation, we seized the old dispatch-box by the han- 
dle, and carried off" our prize with us. 

It may be right to mention, that since our return to England 
we have obtained full authority, from all who had any interest in 
the matter, to deal with this manuscript as we thought proper, — 
on the slight condition that, in some cases, we should substitute 
fictitious names of persons and places for the real ones. 

It is hardly necessary to say that for the division of aich a 
composition into formal and distinct chapters and books, the edi- 
tor must be held responsible. In the original there is occasion- 
ally a heading, or title, and occasionally a date of the day or 
month, but in general one entry is only separated from another 
by a dash or stroke of the pen. These original divisions are 
still indicated, but it was quite necessary to introduce some far- 
ther distribution of its contents into distinct chapters. The few 
dates that were interspersed quite fortuitously it was useless to 
preserve. 

The Fifth and Last Book differs in several respects from the 
rest. Here it is not Thorndale, but his friend Clarence, who 
holds the pen, and he writes out steadfastly and continuously his 
own Confessio Fidei. It is a more systematic statement of opin- 
ion than is to be found in any other part of the book, and perhaps, 
on this account, may please some readers better than the previ- 
ous portion, or that which must be called Thorndale's Diary. 

What else there may be peculiar in this manuscript, or in our 
book, will best explain itself to the reader as he proceeds in its 
perusal. Our Introduction has already occupied too much space. 
One general observation only we will permit ourselves to make. 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

There is much talk here of a future Utopia. But the reader 
need not be alarmed. It is admitted on all hands to be so very 
future, that neither he, nor any posterity in which he is much in- 
terested, will be at all affected by it. Meanwhile there is one 
grand conservative maxim, which every spokesman throughout 
the volume would subscribe to, — it is this, that the measures which 
will really contribute to the progress of society, are always iden- 
tical with those which will promote the welfare of the existing 
generation. From order, order proceeds ; from prosperity, pros- 
perity. We never really advance the future by bringing con- 
fusion into the present, and he who talks of sacrificing the present 
to the future, has yet to learn the first elements of his subject. 
The best government for your own generation, were it a Turkish 
despotism, is also the government which will best promote the 
future welfare of your country ; the best faith for your own gen- 
eration, were it Catholicism, as seen in Mexico and Peru, will be 
the faith most conducible to the progress of generations yet to 
come. Each age, in working out truth and prosperity for itself, 
is working for posterity, and this is the only way in which it can 
work for posterity at all. 

Finally, we dedicate this little book to the idle hour of the 
thoughtful reader ; to the idle hour, for it makes slight preten- 
sions to instruct ; to the thoughtful reader, for it is by the excite- 
ment of reflection it hopes to entertain. 

And yet, if the book excite to reflection, it will afford some- 
thing more than entertainment. Next in value to him who gives 
us truth, is the writer who prompts us to the search of it. 

To him who turns, as he reads, page after page with uniform 
velocity, we promise nothing. Such a reader will soon desert us, 
we suspect. But he who is apt to pause with the forefinger in 
the half-closed volume, — to him we promise, that even out of the 
indecisions and contrarieties of Thorndale and his friends, he 
shall find hints and helps to the formation of that settled and 
Gonsistent scheme of thought which he is doubtless building up 
for himself. 



BOOK I. 

THE LAST RETREAT. 



Bloom, oh ye amaranths, for whom ye may; 
For me ye bloom not ! " 

Coleridge. 



m 



CHAPTER I. 



THE SELF-REVIEW. 



Mount Posilipo, Aug. 1850. 

This habit of the pen clings to me to the last. My thoughts 
are but disjointed fragments— often mere echoes of those which 
long ago had deeply stirred me — yet must I note them down. 
What no other eye but mine will see, what I myself shall never 
turn the page to look back upon, I am restless till I have put 
fairly and legibly on the paper. A most idle industry. I make 
a record for none to read, and register very carefully what I 
commit to oblivion. 

With me, indeed, the pen has been all along an idle toy ; it 
will soon drop from my hand. Idle and purposeless though it 
may be, let me confess that there is no toy in the world that 
can compete with it. Whether we write prose or verse, it is 
always the true magic wand to the one man who holds it. The 
pen repeats, prolongs, redoubles the highest enjoyment we pos- 
sess, the luxury and the triumph of thinking. Each one of us, 
by its aid, arrests some droplet of thought, which he calls his 
own, and hangs it glittering for a moment, with other dew of the 
morning, betwixt him and the sun in heaven — with other dew 
of the morning to be soon swept aside ! 



I am here upon classic ground — surrounded, as they say, by 
classical associations ; — a Sibyl's cave — the tomb of Viro-il — 
the baths of one emperor, the palace of another. Very slight 
and transitory, and mere affairs of yesterday, seem these grave 
antiquities to me. Such classical associations have ceased to 



16 BOOK I.-CHAPTER I. 

affect me ; they have fallen off from the scene. I see only this 
beautiful nature — I meditate only upon man. Rome and the 
Caesars are a little matter ; God, and Nature, and Humanity — 
on these I think incessantly. 

Incessantly — but, alas ! to what result ? The great problems 
of life lie around me unsolved — in hopeless confusion. I must 
leave them thus ! Temples to God, and future palaces for 
humanity, I too have built, or watched the building of them by 
others ; and I have seen them fall and sink into ruin. Amidst 
such ruins — sadder to my mind than those of Carthage — must 
my sun go down. 

I seem now to be standing on that little hillock of loosened 
mould which the sexton throws up on the side of the last home 
which he digs for us. I feel the earth crumbling beneath my 
feet ; it gives way, and fixlls into the dark chasm below. Yet 
whilst I stand, I still look out upon the wide horizon of this 
earth, and speculate — I cannot help it — upon that dawn of a 
happier and wiser life which surely will one day rise upon our 
world. Would that I could catch the glimmering of that dawn ! 
Alas ! I know not here which even is the eastern gate, or in 
what quarter of the horizon to look for the breaking of this bet- 
ter day — this " other morn " which shall " rise on mid-noon." 



I hear my contemporaries boast often of the enlightened age 
they live in. I do not find this light. To me it seems that we 
state our problems somewhat more distinctly than heretofore ; 
I do not find that we solve them. We are very luminous in 
our doubts. Never, I think, since the world began, was so wide 
a prospect of lucid perplexity laid open to the speculative 
mind. We walk our labyrinth in clear day, but we don't get 
out of it. Society and Religion lie dissected before us. We 
analyze, detect, repudiate ; we rush back, and gather up the 
fragments of what a moment before we had torn to pieces. We 
embrace again the old forms and the old creeds, and we embrace 
them at the last perhaps with as much of despair, as of hope. 

Whether my own case is singular, I cannot tell — I suppose 
not ; for the influences which are shaping any one mind in any 



THE SELF-REVIEW. 17 

generation, must cast many others in the same mould. But for 
my own single self, not only has truth been difficult to obtain, 
but what seemed to be truth looked very perilous matter to deal 
with — wore a very questionable shape, half friend, half foe. 
Perhaps I am more than other men deficient in moral courage — 
I do suspect I am somewhat of a coward here ; but so it has 
been with me, that for any energetic purpose my intellect has 
been paralyzed by fear — fear not only of mistaking error for 
truth, but fear of the consequences of what seemed truth itself. 

Equity between man and man — laws made sincerely for the 
good of all, giving each of us fair standing-room to work and 
thrive in — this surely were most excellent. There is nothing 
here to contradict the inevitably personal nature of man. When 
the poet, in his noble aspiration, says — 

" Oh, when shall all men's good 
Be each man's rule ! " 

he does not imply that it is to be each man's sole motive of 
action, but that the personal aims of each should be adjusted 
and conducted under moral rules which really secure (what all 
morality and legislation pretend to secure) the good of all. 
This is what men call justice, and what they are loud in their 
applause of, however they may practically deal with it. Very 
good. But now begin to apply your equitable maxims : you 
sound the tocsin of revolution. In vain you protest that you 
are no Communist — that you respect the right of property as 
the condition of free activity, of the full development of the 
individual character. How is the hereditary right of property, 
as it now stands amongst us, to be upheld in the face of your 
equitable maxim ? You are no better than a firebrand and an 
anarchist. 

Eeligion, too, is surely something better and higher than an 
auxiliary to the constable or the magistrate — a scourge for 
crime, which is to fall the heaviest on those whose lot in life 
has sunk them in the lowest mental degradation — something 
nobler than a future recompense held out to pacify the injured 
and the suffering in an ill-ordered community. Religion, you 
perhaps say, is the cultivation of the human being, the develop- 



18 BOOK I.— CHAPTER I. 

ment of his intellect and affections, under the felt presence of 
the Being who is perfect reason and perfect loye. Were man 
true to his fellow-man, he would then discover how grand and 
how happy a sentiment religion might be ! Very good. But 
seek now to elevate the popular conception of God — seek to 
mitigate those terrors which, in distrust of each other, men fling 
abroad in the name of the Deity — strive now, instead of the 
justice which punishes the detested criminal, to enthrone in 
heaven that equity which also takes cognizance how he became 
a criminal — do you not see that all society is, and must be, in 
arms against you ? In plain, blunt words, you have wiped out 
from men's minds that vision of hell, that great and salutary 
terror, which, more than all other causes put together, is sup- 
posed to secure the peace and order of the world. 

I could never face society with the same faith that I have 
carried into the presence of my God. 

In the portico of St. Peter's at Rome there is a statue of 
Truth, a beautiful figure, leaning upon her sword. That truth 
brings the sword with her will be admitted by all. When will 
she be really seen on earth leaning on it, her work done ? 



" Courage ! Courage ! " I think I hear the ringing voice of 
my friend Clarence exclaim, " Build on ! build always ! It is 
thus only that we can erect and secure the great edifice of a faith. 
Know you not that it is the very condition of all great structures, 
that the sound of the hammer, and the clink of the trowel, should 
be always heard in some part of the building ? " 

Most cheerful and amiable of men, most graceful of artists, 
and the most sanguine of philosophers, how often have I wished 
that I could embrace and hold fast your entire faith in the on- 
ward progress of humanity ! You live 

" In the bright light, 
And breathe the sweet air of futurity." 

By what happy chance or power is it that you have been able to 
extract from philosophy every noble and glorious tenet, and to 
know nothing of its doubts but how to combat them ? Others, 
when absorbe(^ in the future progress of the race of man on earth, 



THE SELF-REVIEW. 19 

forget the immortal hope of the individual soul. / You do not. 
You come with both hands full, and hang your garlands of tri- 
umph on both horns of the altar. You do not drop a leaf 

Most of us, when we have succeeded in building up some 
Utopia upon earth, have found, to our dismay, that we had been 
pulling down the very walls of heaven to build withal. We had 
not materials for both. Clarence is a wiser and a bolder archi- 
tect. He builds at once for immortals here. " Here also we are 
immortal ! " is his frequent saying ; " and this we shall feel as 
we progress. Heaven is not a compensation for life, or an antag- 
onism of life, but the fulness and perfection of life." 

Most of us are under a bondage of fear as well as of hope, 
and think that the bright celestial Above almost implies, as its 
correlate, the dark infernal Below. " I see the archangel of the 
future ! " would Clarence say in his moments of rapture ; " with 
one hand he showers abroad upon all the world the light of im- 
mortality, with the other he shuts for ever the gates of Tarta- 
rus ! " 

Dear Clarence ! how cold, ungracious, and unreasonable must 
I often have appeared when you were unfolding your happy 
prophecies ! A Utopian, and yet no Communist — living for 
Time and for Eternity — fitting a rational society with a pure 
and hopeful religion — what more could one demand of any spec- 
ulative philosopher ? But I have been fatigued and bewildered 
even by the too shadowless brilliancy of your philosophy. It 
seemed that my own little torch burnt dim, and was going out in 
the mid-day splendour of your faith ; I had to carry it into dark 
corners that I might revive the expiring flame. 



I wonder if the few friends I left behind me in England — the 
very few in whom a friendly feeling would arise at mention of 
the name of " Charles Thorndale " — I wonder if they supposed 
that the pale, tottering, consumptive patient who bade them 
adieu, was driven out to this distant abode by the vain hope of 
recovering health or prolonging life ? Or did they imagine that 
they concealed their own forebodings because they only looked 
them, and muttered some kind falsehood with their lips ? I have 



20 BOOK I.— CHAPTER I. 

no hope. I talked of the climate, I thought only of the beauty 
of Italy. I have no hope, nor wish to have ; this certainty is 
much better. I know well how near death is to me. He stands 
very close. It is his cold breath I now feel upon my brow ; his 
cold hand has been laid in mine. We are fellow-lodgers in this 
sweet villa here. I owe to him half the beauty of this scene, 
and altogether owe to him the constant serenity with which I 
gaze upon it. 

I cannot describe that mysterious and tremulous calm with 
which I look out upon this expanse of sun-lit waters — tremulous 
they also with light as I with feeling. Here as I sit at the open 
window, with this beautiful bay outstretched before me, the mind 
is stirred as with the music of unutterable thoughts. Happy 
memories, and every sweet emotion I have known, come back 
and crowd around me. " Once more ! once more ! Look too on 
me ! and on me ! " each thought seems to utter as it passes. 

Strange ! how the beauty and mystery of all nature is height- 
ened by the near prospect of that coming darkness which will 
sweep it all away ! — that night which will have no star in it ! 
These heavens, with all their glories, will soon be blotted out for 
me. The eye, and that which is behind the eye, will soon close, 
soon rest, and there will be no more beauty, no more mystery 
for me. 

These faculties of Sight and Thought, what godlike gifts they 
are ! I feel as one to whom the wonders of creation were re- 
vealed for the first time, and for a single day. What an air of 
freshness, of novelty, and surprise does each old and familiar ob- 
ject assume to me when I think of parting with it for ever ! I 
gaze insatiate ; I muse and marvel unremittingly. I gaze as Mil- 
ton's Adam did when he awoke — child and man at once, — awoke 
to maturest life, and looked out astonished, a new-born w^a?^, upon 
a new created world. Like him, too, I tremble as the sun goes 
down, lest the whole vision, dream and dreamer both, may van- 
ish for ever. Every sunset I behold is my first, and my last. 



" Ah, who would lose this intellectual being, 
These thoughts that wander through eternity! " 

Who indeed ? How precious has this intellectual being become 



THE SELF-REVIEW. 21 

to me ! And yet — and yet — I hate to write the ungracious 
truth — the very limitation of the term of its enjoyment, has 
something to do with the exquisite pleasure derived from the gift. 
I have not always thought it precious. We demand an immor- 
tality, and we run to waste unless our very days are numbered. 
Immortality, to human beings, would be insupportable. And we 
should do nothing with it. We should squander the unlimited 
treasure of our time. For every task there would be an eternal 
to-morrow. Oh, think what eternity would be to one whose na- 
ture it is to fill all futurity with the sadness and terror of the 
present moment. How could he look eternity in the face, who 
recoils, like a scared child, at a few blank years before him ? 

In a very short existence what slow immeasurable periods — 
in a very little life, what length of days have I lived through ! 
In a space that now seems nothing, I have felt as if I were drag- 
ging weary steps over some endless desert. How terrible seemed 
the purposeless and interminable futurity! Yet I had health 
then, and vigour of body and of mind. Now, here I lie in ill- 
ness and in solitude, and lo ! this mere seeing and thinking is as 
the life of a god. 

I know that death is in the room with me, three paces off — 
just somewhere out of sight. Have I not cause to look and lis- 
ten eagerly? 

Well, there is no more of ennui noiv. Time is too short, and 
this world too wonderful. Every thing I behold is new and 
strange. If a dog looks up at me in the face, I startle at his 
intelligence. " I am in a foreign land," you say. True, all the 
world has become foreign land to me. I am perpetually on a 
voyage of discovery. 

When on my journey here, the steamboat kept us, some time 
after the appointed hour, broiling in the port of Marseilles, and I 
sate crouching in the one strip of shadow which the black funnel 
threw upon the deck. I felt no weariness or impatience. I 
could not tire of watching the movement of the rude, noisy, and 
not very cleanly race of mortals who ply their various occupa- 
tions in that busy harbour. These, too, were men — specimens 
of our rational breed — developed, let us say, up to this point, or 



22 BOOK I.— CHAPTER I. 

in this direction. My fellow-men they were undoubtedly, and 
perhaps better men than I, inasmuch as they had lived more 
useful lives ; but this I know, that creatures more strange, not 
Jupiter or Saturn, or any planet in the system, could produce to 
me. 

My fellow-men undoubtedly ; we have the same wants, the 
same senses. But fishes and birds, that are both vertebrated 
animals, do not lead more different lives, or have in some respects 
more different desires. 

Amongst the crowd was one group whose dress distinguished 
them as galley-slaves. These are the rebels against society, who 
would rob and murder, if in some way you did not chain them 
up. The diversity of development extends to this ! 

And then I recurred to the old speculation upon social prog- 
ress. All moral progress finally resolves itself into a public 
opinion wise and unanimous, — which unanimity implies a certain 
degree of similarity in tastes, desires, passions, and a certain gen- 
eral level of intelligence ; and lo ! this inveterate diversity of 
development ! inseparable from our very industry, our produc- 
tive acts, and social organization. Imagine that you, Clarence, 
and that sailor in the red cap, were to consult together on the 
ends and objects of human society ! 



I remember that, as I pursued these reflections under the 
shadow of the funnel, some of my fellow-passengers, impatient 
and indignant at the delay, became loud in their complaints. 
For their part, said some, they were bound to time, and would 
not be trifled with. They had to be at such a place, or to re- 
turn to England by such a day. I, as I listened, felt that I had 
" done with time." There was no business or occupation for me, 
and least of all had I any return-journey to make. I had bade 
farewell to England — for ever — for ever ! 

" See Naples and die ! " is the cuckoo-note of the tourist. How 
often did it afterwards fall upon my ear, bandied about in jest by 
light-hearted travellers ! What to them was jest, was to me a 
sober reality. To see Naples and its beautiful bay, and then to 
die, was precisely the business I had. 



THE SELF-REVIEW. 23 

Why should I wish to live ? Have I not seen, and felt, and 
thought, as I could never again see, or feel, or think ? Why de- 
sire old age, which is but the same world, with dimness and a 
film drawn over the vision of the man ? Better lapse at once 
from youth into oblivion. 

What there is of brief and fitful enchantment in this life of 
man, I too have partly known. I have heard music ; I have 
seen mountains ; I have looked on the sea, and clouds, and flow- 
ing rivers, and the beauty of woman. I have loved ; vainly or 
foolishly, I still have loved. I have known, too, that other en- 
chantment, second only to it, — that early dawn of meditative 
thought, when the stars of heaven are still seen in the faint fresh 
light of the morning ; afterwards there is more light upon the 
earth, but there is no star ; and we wait till the dark comes down 
upon us, before we see the heavens again. 

I have given my heart to the poets ; I have listened eagerly 
to whatever great truth Science has revealed ; I have trod the 
paths of philosophy, till I found them interlacing each other, and 
leading back to my own footmarks in the sand. I have had earn- 
est thoughts and generous emotions. If I were to live for cen- 
turies, centuries would only bring me these in their decay and 
degeneracy. What but the withered leaf of summer has the 
winter to bestow ? 



But this pause, this respite, this precious residue of life, let me 
welcome as it deserves. Silence and solitude, I can face you 
now ! I bring to you a calm as imperturbable as your own. 
That suffering, % whatever name we call it, which springs from 
quickened susceptibilities and a blank of action, has at last left 
me. No long vista, dark with extinguished hopes, now lies be- 
fore me, to be trodden to the end. Those coming years, so pale 
and joyless, — those spectres of the future, — will haunt me no more. 
At every pause of life they stood before me. I could not see the 
little plot of sunshine at my feet for gazing upwards at those fear- 
ful shadows. There was no rest at the halting-place ; in the still- 
ness there was no peace. Now all this is changed. Time has 
once for all set down his hour-glass before me ; there it stands ; 



24 BOOK I.— CHAPTER I. 

a few sands, precious as gold, are all that remain. How swiftly 
they run ! and there is no hand can turn the glass ! 

Here will I live alone. No one will seek me here ; and if I 
ride out, drawn slowly through the air, no one will recognize me. 
I am as secure as if I wore the " invisible coat." I have alto- 
gether escaped the irksome toil of finding silly answers for trite 
unmeaning questions ; I am safe from the dreary gossip of tedious 
and formal visitors. And the physician's punctual visit, I am rid 
of that too. Whatever medical science can do has been done. 
The same instructions, and the same prescriptions, were inces- 
santly repeated. The good Bernard knows them all. He is my 
valet, cook, apothecary ; he, with his broths and his decoctions, 
will do all that the most learned medicus could here accomplish. 

The good Bernard, I think, likes this life. I think, too, he 
serves me from affection. He takes a pleasure in humouring my 
tastes, — has partly adopted the same tastes himself, — likes this 
retirement, and moves noiselessly about. He will do every thing 
himself rather than admit a stranger. Quiet, and yet incessantly 
occupied, I think the time passes as rapidly with him as with me. 



CHAPTER 11. 



TRUISMS. 



I AM approaching — I have reached — that epoch of our lives 
when the great question — Mortal or Immortal ? — is supposed to 
have a quite peculiar and overwhelming interest. For myself, I 
have rarely passed a day without some reflection on this and 
other kindred topics, and therefore it is impossible that my inter- 
est in them should be greatly augmented. Neither is that inter- 
est, any more than heretofore, of a very personal nature. With 
me such questions have generally run in the name of all humanity. 
Right or wrong, or from whatever cause it may be owing, it has 
been the greatness of the inquiry that has always fascinated me, 
not my own individual hopes and fears. I have more often asked 
how far this creature ma«, this homo^ this human species, is enti- 
tled to believe itself immortal, or how far human life as a whole 
would be impoverished by the loss of this faith, than I have 
indulged in any anticipations of my own prolonged existence. 
" God will not take away our immortality," says Clarence, " be- 
cause we have but little enjoyed the hope of it. Rest your head, 
childlike, on the one visible arm of the Paternal Deity, though ; 
you cannot see distinctly where the other and outstretched arm is ' 
pointing." * 



I do not find that my heart beats quicker now than at former 
times at this great question. Nor, alas ! do I find, as some have 
deemed, that there are any truths which become more vivid and 
distinct as we descend that dark avenue which conducts us to the 
tomb. 

2 



26 BOOK L— CHAPTER H. 

Yes ! yes ! there are truths which become more vivid and 
distinct as we enter this dark avenue which conducts us to the 
tomb ; but it is on looking hack that we discover them. They 
are the truths we have passed by, and hved amongst — truths of 
that common dayhght we are quitting — so famihar, we called 
them truisms — truths which the child lisps, and the youth kindles 
at, and only the too busy man forgets. 

That there is sympathy and love in the heart of man, and that 
thus his very self, his very personal desires, at once embrace' the 
good of others as well as his own — what a truth is this ! That 
man looks before and after, and discriminates, and compares the 
good and evil he has endured, and can thus choose his way, and 
can choose for others also ; and that the bond of human fellow- 
ship, rule and custom, and the voice of all heard by each, adds 
to the reasonable choice of the Good, the stable sentiment of Duty, 
or rather the two blend together in one indissoluble union — what 
a truth is this ! That the broken and partial picture of the world 
which the senses reflect, grows gradually, in the human reason, 
into order and unity, and ampHfies into what we call science, till, 
in the consciousness of man, what at first was the " fair imper- 
fection" of the senses, shapes itself into the divine idea, the 
manifested thought of God — is not this, too, a great truth ? And 
all along there is beauty, visibly brightening over the whole crea- 
tion, compelHng the heart of man to love, where as yet he cannot 
comprehend, the Creator. To embrace the good of others — of a 
whole society ;^ to apprehend the world in its divine unity, — to 
feel how beautiful it is ! — the Good, the True, the Beautiful, as 
some catalogue them — here are three gifts, than which could God 
give greater to his creature ? 



" It is happier to love than to hate." " Temperance is the line 
which divides pain from pleasure." There is a whole system of 
morals in these truisms. 

Yes, there are recognized truths enough to build up a glorious 
world withal, would men but build. If that which none denies 
as moral truth had but its legitimate sequence in human action, 
what a revolution should we see ! What a regeneration for 



TRUISMS. 27 

mankind in the simple words Justice and Temperance ! What 
is this we call industry, activity, energy, but very life itself — the 
power put forth that is within us ? If men were active to good 
ends (which is a joy both of deed and thought) ; if they M^ere 
temperate (which is pleasure without the rebound of pain) ; if 
they were just and equitable (which is the condition of assured 
enjoyment for each and all) — what prosperous and contented 
multitudes would people the earth ! It wants so little to make 
of earth a heaven. It is so reasonable a thing that the whole of 
mankind should be happy. 

Alas ! it is precisely the most reasonable thing that, in human 
affairs, it is the most preposterous to expect. So at least the 
cynic wisdom of the world has decided ; and the world, by this 
time, should know something of itself. 

Of your three glorious gifts how scant a portion falls to the 
lot of most of us ! The fair inheritance is intercepted, never 
comes to hand — no inkling got of it by many. And the happier 
few — how can they enjoy tlieir souls in peace, within hearing of 
the wail of sorrow, or the shouts of maniacs ? In self-defence 
they too must become a little mad. 



It is easy to despond. And if the progress you wish to be- 
lieve in must be rapid, I have nothing but despondency to offer 
you. But suppose you were to put the question thus — Will the 
slowly advancing intelligence of men modify their passions, and 
give birth to desires in stricter accordance with the good of each 
and all, or will certain passions and appetites for ever hold the 
intellect in thraldom, reducing it to be still their instrument ? 
The answer surely would be on the side of hope. No fact, it 
must be admitted, is more certain than that our passions do lord 
it over the reason, making increased knowledge and ability sub- 
servient to them. But there is another fact, less ostensible, but 
equally certain, that increase of knowledge brings with it new 
desires, or tames the old ; and men's very passions, their tastes, 
wishes, desires, grow to be more reasonable — grow to be such 
as, by their very gratification, promote the good of the whole, 
and the more permanent and complete good of the man himself. 



28 BOOK L— CHAPTER II. 

It is this slow modification of desires themselves that we must 
depend on, rather than any more stringent coercion (whether 
legislative or educational) of existing desires. 
X We are ultimately in the power of our ideas. These modify 
our passions. In this or that individual man, the victory be- 
tween Passion and Reason may be doubtful. In Humanity, as 
it lives from age to age, the final victory is not so doubtful. 
Slowly and surely the Intelligence modifies the passion to itself. 
Compare the passion of revenge in civilized countries with the 
same passion amongst savages. 



I have no sympathy with those philosophers who delight to 
represent our morality as the product of some especial faculty, 
moral sense, intuition — something which must not be analyzed, 
or shown to resolve itself into the reason and passions of social 
man. It is with me a truism of the highest order and most 
hopeful character that there is no appeal beyond the reason, the 
knowledge of the man. And this grows I 

" Immutable morality." Certainly, most venerable Cudworth, 
it is immutable as the sources of happiness and misery — immu- 
table as the faculties of man — immutable as society itself, in 
which always some morality must arise. But inasmuch as man 
is a progressive creature, and acquires knowledge, and with 
knowledge power, and with new power new desires, his morality 
is happily not immutable. 



I like to notice how admirably the requisite, stability of a 
moral rule is combined with the capability of movement and 
progress. The law-making race of man draws a line, and all 
on this side is right, and on that side is wrong. This line seems 
to each generation to have been drawn once and for ever, and to 
be immovable. Nevertheless, it does move — slowly, like the 
shadow on the dial, and moves as the light of knowledge rises 
liiffher in the skies. 



•tj' 



Curious to observe how some speculative men insist upon the 



TRUISMS. 29 

will, as if airiay there. Their great topic is the freedom of 
man's will, as if this meant something else than the privilege of 
being guided by his intellectual apperception. A tiger has will 
enough, if this were anything to the purpose where will is 
divorced from intelligence. Most villains are remarkable for 
their strength of M'ill. Will is synonymous with Power, and 
ultimately presents itself as a mere physical power to act. All 
depends on the Thought which makes this power its own. 

Determine what you may about this Will, know that the 
freedom of the man lies in his reason. He can reflect upon his 
own future conduct, and summon up its consequences ; he can 
take wide views of human life, and lay down rules for constant 
guidance ; and thus he is relieved from the tyranny of sense and 
passion, and enabled at any time to live according to the whole 
light of the knowledge that is within him, instead of being driven 
slave-bound by every present impulse. Here lies the freedom of 
the man. So much light, so much liberty. 

I cannot liberate you from all motive — even a state of idiocy 
does not proffer a complete liberty of this kind ; but the higher 
motive to which you have pledged yourself, will make you free 
of a baser one. This is the only intelligible freedom. This is the 
freedom that can increase — can grow. " I can move my arm this 
way or that,") I hear some controversialist exclaim, " with or 
without a motive, just as I ivilll" You, move your arm I pre- 
sume, because you like to move, or wish to show you can move it ; 
so slight a purpose can set you in action. But what, if you really 
have attained to the inconceivable dignity of acting voluntarily 
without any purpose whatever, and so proved yourself to be a 
sort of puppet without wires — what an insane business it is ! 
Only where you have a purpose, are you acting rationally — only 
then do you come into the domains of reason and morality. 

Thus we come back again to our truism : the final appeal is 
to an idea — to our knowledge, our intelligence. 



We may look upon the progress of man as ultimately resolv- 
ing itself into a gradual revelation of truth to the human intellect. 
His advance in knowledge manifests itself — 1. In his increased 



30 BOOK I.— CHAPTER II. 

power (the powers of nature are put into his hands) ; 2. In the 
great contemplation of Science — the world is seen, admired, loved 
as the Divine Idea; and, 3. In that idea of Humanity, or of 
Human Life as a whole, which each one should carry in his own 
mind, and which should be the fountain-source of his morality. 
If you ask whence this increment of truth which initiates all 
these progressive movements, I can only trace this mental light 
like the common sunlight at our feet, to its source in heaven. 
Very fitly has all knowledge been called God's revelation. 

Ponder it well : are not our three great gifts, the True, the 
Good, and the Beautiful, constantly being disseminated by this 
one process — the expansion of the human intellect ? And still 
it grows — it grows ! Is there not hope that a time may come 
when all will get their great inheritance,— their share in these 
three great gifts ? 



CHAPTER III. 

FRAGMENTS ON THE SENTIMENT OF BEAUTY. 

Here surely one feels one's self in the presence of a Divine 
Beneficence. What a heaven of beauty do I live in ! 

I sometimes say to myself, when looking out upon this scene, 
" Let man grow good and wise as the angels — let him reach his 
ideal of perfection — he will not at least need a new earth or 
other skies to live in." 

In truth, the earth grows more beautiful, as we grow better 
and wiser. The sentiment of beauty is no one feeling of the 
eye, or of the mind. It is a gathering of many sensations, many 
feelings, many thoughts, — perhaps taking its point of departure 
from the exquisite pleasure of colour, blended with variety and 
symmetry of form ; for forms, like sounds, appear to have a 
species of harmony, appealing at once to the sense, whether we 
regard the several parts of a single form, or the approximation 
of several distinct forms. 



I am never more convinced of the progress of mankind than 
when I think of the sentiment developed in us by our intercourse 
with nature, and mark how it augments and refines with our moral 
culture, and also (though this is not so generally admitted) with 
our scientific knowledge. We learn from age to age to see the 
beauty of the world ; or, what comes to the same thing, this 
beautiful creation of the sentiment of beauty is developing itself 
in us. 

Only reflect what regions lovely as Paradise there are over 
all Asia and Europe, and in every quarter of the globe, waiting 
to receive their fitting inhabitants — their counterparts in the 



32 BOOK I.— CHAPTER III. 

conscious creature. The men who are now living there do not 
see the Eden that surrounds them. They lack the moral and 
intellectual vision. It is not too bold a thing to say that, the 
mind of man once cultivated, he will see around him the Para- 
dise he laments that he has lost. For one " Paradise Lost," he 
will sing of a thousand that he has gained. 



The savage whose eye detects the minutest speck upon the 
horizon, is blind as a mole to the Elysium that surrounds him. 
Ay, and the poet finds a paradise wherever there is a single 
leaf to tremble against the sky. 

Mark, too, how the sense of beauty reacts upon the nature of 
the man, disposing to deeds of gentleness and peace. We tread 
more softly as the scene grows more beautiful. 



That many reflective men should be solicitous to abstract a 
cherished sentiment like this of Beauty from all baser admix- 
tures of our sensational nature, and should proclaim it to be a 
pure intuition of the soul, seems natural and pretty — a sort of 
poetizing philosophy, but not very wise. All nature is one, — 
one Divine Idea. Let what you call the baser be raised in 
our estimation when we find it a part, or a condition, of the 
higher. 

Analysis destroys nothing that nature grows ; it only gives 
us some little insight into the laws of growth. Did the cell- 
theory reduce all vegetation into isolated cells ? Did it any- 
thing else than add new wonder to the flower and the tree ? 
Mental analysis, in like manner, merely teaches us the order of 
creation. And whatever is added to the human consciousness 
is just as new, and just as fresh from the hand of God, whether 
we can, or cannot, trace the prior conditions of its existence. 

Whether it is the metaphysician with his catalogue of Facul- 
ties, or the phrenologist with his array of Organs, I have learnt 
•to distrust these our popular distinctions — that is, as scientific 
distinctions. In popular language, we must always speak of the 
stem, and the leaf, and the fruit as distinct things, and yet the 



FRAGMENTS ON THE SENTIMENT OF BEAUTY. 33 

same few principles of growth may apply to all. I can only 
conceive of the mind, or human consciousness, as one great and 
amazing growth of all but infinite variety, and yet essentially 
one. Sensations become memories, and memories combine 
(according to a few simple laws) to form endless varieties of 
consciousness. God alone can know into what grander or 
more perfect forms the consciousness of man shall thus develop 
itself. 

From the first sensation an infant feels in its own body (for I 
am bold enough to believe, in spite of the current teaching of our 
metaphysicians, that the first sensations are felt there, localized 
at once in its body, and are at once, therefore, both cognition 
and also pleasures and pains) — from those first sensations felt as 
it lies in the mother's bosom, which are at once its knowledge 
and its slow and languid joy, to the magnificent and ordered 
perturbation of some great orator's mind, when thought and 
feeling are blended in a thousand ways, the whole is one con- 
tinuous growth. 



But, for my part, I would rather now look out on nature — 
look, feel, and resign myself to the dehght it kindles — than 
attempt to trace the steps by which this great happiness devel- 
ops itself in the mind of man. God has built for beauty as well 
as for use or stability. Why should we scruple to call Him the 
Great Artist as well as the Great Architect ? Look ! the busy 
day is ended, and man rests from his work, and that sun that had 
lit him at his toil — oh, what make you of this splendour in which 
it sets ? Does it not now light up the heaven for his wonder 
and his adoration ? 

Shall I not call him Artist, — grandest and most beneficent of 
artists, — Him who placed the moon out yonder, — there, in the 
distant space, — and then drew the passing cloud before and under 
it ? He made her orb thus ample, and placed it far off in space, 
and drew the nearer cloiid slowly between us and it. How mag- 
nificent it is ! 



Very exquisite is this harmony between the distant and the 

2* 



34 BOOK I.— CHAPTER III. 

near. I look through the branches of this graceful tree, and see 
a star amongst them. 

In the daytime a bird was sitting there, more restless than the 
leaves. And now the light leaves move to and fro ; and the eter- 
nal stars, from their immeasurable distances, shine in amongst 
them. The near and the remote are brought together in the 
common bond of beauty. 



The two grandest things on earth are the barren mountain and 
the barren sea. Barren ! what a harvest does the eye reap from 
them ! 

Strange ! that yonder huge mound of rock and earth should 
gather out the sky hues softer than those of the violet ! At set 
of sun it flushes into perfect rose. While I am now looking, the 
light of noon has interpenetrated and etherealized the massive 
mountains, and they are so filled with light as to be almost invis- 
ible. They are more ethereally bright than the brightest clouds 
above them. And they too, — how beautiful are clouds ! What 
a noble range of cloud-built Alps are now towering in the sky ! 
Those mountains of another element, how they love to poise 
themselves over their stationary brethren of the earth ! 



" When the lofty and barren mountain," says a legend I have 
somewhere read, " was first upheaved into the sky, and from its 
elevation looked down on the plains below, and saw the valley 
and the less elevated hills covered with verdant and fruitful trees, 
it sent up to Brahma something like a murmur of complaint, — 
' Why thus barren ? why these scarred and naked sides exposed 
to the eye of man ? ' And Brahma answered, ' The very light 
shall clothe thee, and the shadow of the passing cloud shall be as 
a royal mantle. More verdure would be less light. Thou shalt 
share in the azure of heaven, and the youngest and whitest cloud 
of a summer's sky shall nestle in thy bosom. Thou belongest 
half to us.' 

" So was the mountain dowered. And so too," adds the legend, 
" have the loftiest minds of men been in all ases dowered. To 



FRAGMENTS ON THE SENTIMENT OF BEAUTY. 35 

lower elevations have been given the pleasant verdure, the vine, 
and the olive. Light, light alone, — and the deep shadow of the 
passing cloud, — these are the gifts of the prophets of the race." 



How every tender as well as every grand sentiment comes re- 
llected back to us from the beautiful objects of nature ! Therein 
lies their very power to enchant us. Nature is full of our own 
human heart. That rose, — has not gentle woman leant over it, 
and left the reflection of her own blush upon the leaves of the 
flower ? To the lover, I think, the rose is always half virgin, 
and but half rose. To the old man there is childhood in every 
bud. No hand so rude but that it gathers with the flower more 
and other beauty than what the dews of heaven had nourished 
in it. 



Above all, note this, — how sympathy with the living thing and 
its enjoyment, adds to the beauty of all animated nature. It 
is thus that life becomes so great an element in the beautiful. 
When we commend some animal for the grace, the vivacity, the 
joyousness of its movements, we are pouring forth our own love 
and sympathy with all this grace and joy. 

I was once ushered, in companionship with my fair cousin 
Winifred, through a quite unparalleled collection, as we were 
assured, of stuffed birds. There they stood in all their briUiant 
plumage, their form and colour scrupulously preserved. Wini- 
fred was solicitous to be pleased, and made efforts to admire. It 
would not do. For all their gay plumage they were but a sort 
of mummies — dead things ; she could feel no interest in them. 
To complete her distraction, she spied, through the open window, 
a little sparrow hopping on the gravel walk of the garden, peck- 
ing about for crumbs. Call it beauty or what you will, it woke 
that sympathy and loving admiration which all the dead plumage 
of India had failed to stir. " Do you see that sparrow ? " she 
whispered into my ear, — an ear that caught every whisper of 
hers, and treasured, without effort, every word, — " he is now fly- 
ing off into the trees with something in his bill. Well, — but do 



36 BOOK I.— CHAPTER III. 

not repeat it to our host, — I must confess to you that that little 
black fellow is more beautiful to me than all these gorgeous crea- 
tures glued to their perch." 

I thought her right. Perhaps at that time I thought every 
thing she said was right. How beautiful she was. How it all 
culminates there ! 



Beauty throws a protection over every thing that has life. A 
poor protection, you will say, against the hungry sportsman, who 
never spared the deer for all his gracefulness. True ; but the 
charm, wherever it is felt, is sufficient to protect against wanton 
destruction. 

Even as I write, some descendant of that little sparrow which 
caught the eye of Winifred, has taken its perch on the sill of the 
window. Fearless of my quiet figure, it is looking in, and about 
him, with a most charming mimicry of human observation. What 
its own thoughts may be, one would give something to under- 
stand. It is impossible to sit and watch its movements without 
feeling some sentiment of love towards the little, graceful, active, 
joyous creature. You could not hurt it. You could not, out of 
mere sport, to see if you could hit, deliberately shoot that bird. 
You would feel more disposed to shoot the man who did so. 



Some poets, in their verses, have lamented the inroad which 
science will occasionally make in their favourite associations, or 
predilections. A weak lament. Speaking largely, the more we 
know of nature, the more beautiful it becomes. Who has not 
felt that such knowledge as he had acquired of physiology and 
comparative anatomy (remote enough at first from agsthetics) has 
ended by throwing a fresh grace over every limb, a fresh charm 
over every movement in the animal creation ? As to the vege- 
table world — as to our trees — I have not skill enough in language 
to describe the mystery and enchantment which modern sciences 
— whether of light, of chemistry, or of vital growth — have filled 
them with for me. Their leaves, as they rustle, seem to murmur 
of the half-told secrets of all creation. 



FRAGMENTS ON THE SENTIMENT OF BEAUTY. 37 

And take this with you : as science advances, each object, with- 
out losing its individuality, speaks more and more of the whole ; 
and this — that each living thing' gets some beauty from the har- 
mony disclosed in its own structure. 



I ask the mountain, Why art thou suddenly so dark ? And 
the mountain answers, Ask the passing cloud that shadows me. 
Why, oh most beautiful ocean, art thou so changeful ? And the 
sea answers, Ask the sky above, that showers down, now radiance, 
now this gloom. Why, oh thou eternal sky, dost thou wrap thy- 
self in clouds ? And the sky answers, Ask the valleys of the 
earth ; they breathe this sadness up to me ; it is not mine. 

Nothing stands circumscribed within itself. There is no self 
that is not half another's. Or say that every individuality is but 
the power of the whole manifesting itself thus and thus. 



. - Amidst all this beauty I catch sight, at an angle of the shore, 
of a solitary monk. He surely thinks himself alone. He is 
separated from the world. He has cast it all aside ; even, per- 
haps, the unoffending beauty of this scene. He surely is alone. 
Not so. That corrupt and boisterous city on which he turns his 
back — which, even in resolving to forget, he must incessantly 
remember — lo ! its vanity and lies have made this hermit of him. 
This sadness is not his. Nay, even the dead in their graves, and 
bygone ages, and past centuries, of which he knows nothing, have 
helped to make him the strange creature that he wanders there. 
The wicked world has given him half his piety, the cloister the 
other half. 

You take a single soul, and tax it with its single guilt. It is 
right and fit to do so. And yet in every single soul it is the 
whole world you judge. 

Yes ! it is right, and fit, and reasonable that the man, whilst 
living with his kind, should be treated as the sole originator of all 
he does of good or of evil. Cover him with honour ! Stamp 
him with infamy ! Thus only can man make an ordered world 
of it. And are not this reciprocated honour and dispraise, given 



o8 BOOK L— CHAPTER III. 

and received by nil, great part of human life itself? But in thy 
hands, oh Rhadamanthus, judge of the dead ! what is this soli- 
tary soul ? It is but as a drop from the great ocean of life — 
clear, or foul, as winds from either pole have made it. Ay, and 
the very under-soil on which it lay, on which it was tossed to 
and fro, had been broken up by forgotten earthquakes and ex- 
tinct volcanoes. A whole eternity had been at ^vork where that 
drop of discoloured water came from. 

But what is this ? I am leaving the passive beauty of nature 
for the perplexing problems of life — of our acting and suffering 
humanity. Ah ! let me seal up that fountain of unquiet thoughts, 
and gaze on the placidity of these waters and these heavens. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE TWO FUTURITIES. 

I HAVE been sitting here, I know not how long, watching this 
beautiful sea-bird. I saw it sail up from the far horizon, steadily 
up towards the zenith, and there pause — the slight centre, for a 
time, of one whole hemisphere. In this clear sky and universal 
calm, I could watch, I could almost feel, each soft stroke of its 
wing — soft, measured, strong. Oh, what a pulse of health and 
joy seemed beating through the wide air ! With what conscious 
power it soared, and then poised itself motionless on its secure 
and outstretched wings ! There it still hangs — calm and alone, 
one little speck of life, one sentient breathing thing, suspended 
in this dome of heaven, and over this illimitable sea. There it 
hangs, alone, fearless, calm, in all this world of light, and beauty, 
and omnipotence. 

Vain, beautiful bird ! were the wish of mortal man to live 
in such peace as thine. It is not the buoyant wing he wants ; 
not even, or altogether, the buoyant heart. It is thy single- 
thoughted spirit that floats thee fearless and peaceful over these 
illuminated solitudes. Man hopes too much, and knows too little. 

In all this blaze of light he looks beyond the sun. 



The bird has its mate to love, and has its prey to seize ; and it 
camps in freedom, on its broad pinions, in the boundless air. 
Few relations has it with the great universe, and these easily 
harmonized. Man pays dearly for the complicated nature of his 
being. What a world of passions and of thoughts to be harmo- 
nized within himself! What numerous relations to the visible 
world ! — And — destiny, how strange ! — what mysterious relations 



40 BOOK I.— CHAPTER IV. 

to the invisible, to the remote, to the unknown ! Hardly can he 
get together some little science, some faint intelhgence of the 
very world he lives in, and lo ! he has to deal with unseen 
worlds — with conceptions which have no objective reality in the 
world of sense — conceptions which spring up in the mind of man 
by its own exuberant fertilit3^ Is he to check them as imagina- 
tions unauthorized by any real counterpart in creation ? Or is 
he to regard them as the very highest knowledge, which, by its 
own laws, the mind thus generates for itself? 

Ay, and in these latter times a new trouble afflicts him. His 
future world in the skies was at least created there without his 
aid — did not need his help or co-operation for its structure ; but 
now he has a future society on earth, a terrestrial Utopia, to the 
completion, or the bringing in, of which each successive genera- 
tion is bound to contribute. This new hope is a new responsi- 
bility, often a new turmoil, for the poor imperfect societies that 
already exist. 

These two ideal futurities — of the Individual Soul, and of Con- 
gregated Humanity (I use the term ideal as opposed to the expe- 
rienced, by no means as opposed to the true) — these Two Ideal 
Futurities have pretty well occupied my own poor allotment of 
present existence. I have lived, for the most part, not, alas ! in 
the glorious imagination of them, but in the vain effort to con- 
struct or comprehend them. What fluctuations of feeling and 
judgment have I not endured ! Now one of these ideals, now 
the other, was adopted ; rarely could I retain them both, never 
contentedly relinquish either. 

I have lived an idle life. I have been too exclusively devoted 
to mere rspeculation to succeed even in that. I do not say with 
Goethe. -' An action is the end of life." A thought is quite as 
much so. The true thought is that in which life culminates. But 
I can deprecate as sincerely as any one the divorce between 
thought and action. 

Action tests our opinions — harmonizes them — makes the need- 
ful compromise. Moreover, it is when opinion has become a 
purpose, a motive of action, that it assumes the name and stabil- 
ity of a faith. 



THE TWO FUTURITIES. 41 

We can hardly be said to have a belief in immortality till we 
have begun to live for it — to prepare for it — personally to antici- 
pate and to act for it. And as to mere theories of Progress, I 
have known the work of years vanish in an hour. One unlucky 
fact may throw a whole system to the winds. I have more con- 
fidence in the faith of the philanthropist who has built a public 
wash-house, or given to it but a solitary wash-tub, than in the 
convictions of one w^ho has lived all his days (as I have lived) a 
mere and painful student of humanity. 



Yes ! we should all have our w^ork to do — work of some kind. 
I do not look upon him as an object of compassion who finds it in 
hard manual labour, so long as the frame is not overtasked, and 
springs, after rest, with renewed vigour to its toil.^ Hard labour 
is a source of more pleasure in a great city, in a single day, than 
all which goes by the especial name of pleasure, throughout the 
year. ) We must all have our task. We are wretched without it. 
Him we call "man of pleasure " makes a sort of business of his 
pleasure ; has a routine and method in his dissipations ; dines out, 
and visits much against the grain, that he may continue to dine 
out and visit with the same unwillingness. Even the poet, the 
most luxurious of mortals, wlio feeds on thought deliciously, must 
make of his murmuring honey -work a task and occupation. He 
runs out into some charming solitude to gaze about him, and utter 
melodious verse ; but if he cannot convert those loose papers in 
his desk into something he can call his work, his beautiful soli- 
tude will soon lose its charms. Mountain, or lake, or valley, it 
will be all flat and arid as the desert. 



Stand aside from the crowd, and look on — have no other 
business than to look on — how mad and preposterous, how pur- 
poseless and inexplicable, wall the whole scene of human hfe 



appear ! 



" How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
All the uses of this world ! " 



42 BOOK I.— CHAPTER IV. 

Step down into the crowd ; choose a path, or let accident 
choose for you ; be one of the jostling multitude ; have wishes 
and a pursuit ; and how full of meaning and purpose has it all 
become ! I This labyrinth of life is ever a straight path to him 
who keeps walking. 

And as with the purposes of life, so is it with our speculative 
creeds. Stand apart and look on — take up your station at the 
porch of the church, and only question why others enter there. 
Oh, you may stand and question to the day of doom ! Step 
within — creep but to the first altar — bend a knee — to any saint 
you please in the calendar — utter but one prayer, one petitionary 
word — henceforth you are CHrolled amongst the faithful. If 
Heaven has not yet answered — it heard that prayer — can you 
withdraw it ? Why or wherefore you entered, is no more the 
question ; it is plain enough you cannot leave. 



I call to mind a beautiful and familiar experiment of the 
lecture-room. In the darkened room a flash of electric light is 
thrown upon a rapidly-revolving wheel. For one instant every 
spoke in the wheel is seen most distinct, most luminous, and 
quite stationary. Let any one throw for an instant — and it will 
probably be only for an instant — the pure light of reason upon 
his own giddily revolving life, and every thought and feeling will 
be seen most distinct, and motionless. Beneath that ray life 
pauses. 



Refine ! refine ! Live only in the higher meditative regions 
of the soul ! It sounds Hke good advice. But with the last 
dross goes the last strength. Your passionless thought leaves 
you without a thing to cling to — or to be ; you are all — you are 
nothing. Mere thinking throws you abroad upon the winds — 
flings you to the stars, if you will — but you are as homeless and 
purposeless there as you were upon the earth. 



How full of human life is this belief in immortality ! Merely 



THE TWO FUTURITIES. 43 

to proclaim an eternal existence to a spiritual entity, which in 
this world, and in this body, works out such consciousness as we 
have here, goes very little way to an effective faith in immor- 
tahty. There must be some mode of future existence — some 
specific happiness to be looked for — or the creed becomes a 
mere philosophical abstraction. That friend we have lost, and 
hope to see again — that peace we have sighed for — that harbour 
of repose which has moved before us as we seemed approaching 
it — expectations such as these, gathered out of life, give anima- 
tion to our creed of immortality. 



As a speculative reasoner, I should say that this Great Hope 
develops itself out of the knowledge and contemplation of God. 
The desire for a divine and eternal life brings and justifies it. 
The auxiliary arguments drawn from other unsatisfied desires, 
or from the utility of the faith as an instrument for the good 
government of society, I should be afraid to rely on — that is, in 
the courts of logic. I know the efficacy they have in the world 
at large. 



In a book which I have just laid down, and where the author 
was arguing this very subject, I met with the following passage : 
" How cruel would it be if friendships formed on earth, should 
ue extinguished on the borders of the grave ! " 

This is the natural language, I presume, of ardent feeling. 
Y'et, in reality, how few of our friendships last so long as to be 
carried to the borders of the grave ! How often do they suffer 
a speedier ^nd far more cruel extinction ! Are there many of 
us to whom, on disembarking on that other shore, a hand could 
be extended on which we would swear an eternal friendship ? 

Some of our friendships — and not the very worst — are kept 
alive because we know they will not be eternal. We make no 
effort to disturb what some chance, we think, will soon deter- 
mine. 

And why " cruel ? " for in the case supposed there can be no 
being to feel the cruelty ? 



44 BOOK I.— CHAPTEK IV. 

On no subject, perhaps, has so much weak reasoning been 
permitted to pass current as on this of the immortality of the 
soul ; partly because men had already a faith secured to them 
on quite other authority, on quite other grounds, than those 
reasonings which served very pleasingly and eloquently to fill 
up the page. In old wood-cuts one sometimes sees a vessel in 
full sail upon the ocean, and perched aloft upon the clouds are a 
number of infant cherubs, with puffed-out cheeks, blowing at the 
sails. The swelling canvas is evidently filled by a stronger 
wind than these infant cherubs, sitting in the clouds, could sup- 
ply. They do not fill the sail, but they were thought to fill up 
the picture prettily enough. 

Most of these arguments resolve themselves into passionate 
wishes to prolong some experienced delight, or to gratify some 
thwarted desire. A fragment of this present life is torn from 
all its necessary conditions, and perpetuated in the future world. 
Sometimes the action of the drama, broken off on earth, is to be 
carried on elsewhere ; the revenge is to be completed, the calam- 
ity to be redressed. Sometimes the happiest scene of all the 
drama, alas ! so transitory here, is represented as stationary and 
eternal there. Loving souls love on for ever. They see them- 
selves like a group of beautiful sculpture, placed, safe and change- 
less, in Elysian bowers. Beautiful sculpture it must be ; for life, 
as we know it — the very life they would transfer into eternity — 
is perpetual change — is growth and decay, extinction and repro- 
duction ; and our present human consciousness is built on, or in- 
terlaced with, the incessant movements of a vital form, that 
grows, blossoms, and dies like any other flower of the earth. 



As poetry, I can admire what I cannot admit within the 
domain of philosophy. It is very beaiitiful to see the image of 
Regret become, by its very vividness, a Hope. 

I lose my friend, but death, that could kill my friend, could 
not kill my memory of him. His form survives for me. I can- 
not but think it as existing. It asserts and constructs for itself 
a locality : not being here, it must be elsewhere. It was not 
another world to which the first spectre flitted, but the first 



THE TWO FUTURITIES. 45 

indestructible spectre of the memory made a new world for 
itself. 

And it is not love only that creates and peoples this other 
realm. I have been wronged, and I am unavenged ; my enemy 
has escaped me ; he has died fult of honours ; he sleeps in his 
peaceful grave. No ! he shall not escape me — I drag him from 
his peaceful grave. Oh ye gods ! what wrongs he did me ! 
Pierce him now with your inevitable shafts ! Plunge him — for 
you can — into eternal torments ! 



A fond mother loses her infant. What more tender than the 
hope she has to meet it again in heaven ! Does she really, then, 
expect to find a little child in heaven ? — some angel-nursling that 
she may eternally take to her bosom, fondle, feed, and caress ? 
Oh, do not ask her ! I would not have her ask herself. The 
consolatory vision springs spontaneously from the mother's grief. 
It is Nature's own remedy. She gave that surpassing love, and 
a grief as poignant must follow. She cannot take away the grief; 
she half transforms it to a hope. 



Two lovers, soon after their happy union, are. separated by death. 
How vivid is the faith of the survivor that they shall meet again ! 
Surely somewhere they shall be reunited. Is there not space 
enough, — are there not stars enough in the wide heavens ? And 
all they want is a little space to love in, — some foot-hold given 
them in the creation. All the rest of their eternal joy they carry 
with them, — such joy as it would surely be amazing waste and 
prodigaUty to let fall out of the universe. 

What if they had lived and loved a little longer on the earth ? 
Perhaps the star would not have been wanted. 



I find, for my own part, that the second great article of relig- 
ion is bound up with the first. A faith in God, and a habit of 
contemplating His existence, brings with it that earnest desire for 
a fuller knowledge of the divine IMind, and a more intimate com- 



46 BOOK I.— CHAPTER IV. 

munion with it, which irresistibly leads to the faith in Immortal- 
ity. 

I shall not here go into the great subject of the existence of 
God. It would lead me very far : because, although the argu- 
ment itself — such argument as I should rely on — may be stated 
in three words, yet the metaphysical objections which have been 
raised against the argument (chiefly because in our popular works 
it is too imaginatively or anthropomorphically stated) could not 
be dealt with in a very short compass. Besides, I am in no 
humour to go over this dreary ground. To me all nature can 
only be conceived, can only be intellectually apprehended, as 
the manifestation of a Divine Reason. On other topics I have 
wavered, and may still waver. This is a truth which has grown 
more and more distinct to me with every addition of knowledge 
I have acquired. 

Well, I repeat that the hope of immortality develops itself 
from this truth. As to the nature of the human soul itself, it is 
quite enough to say that no hypothesis we can form (not even 
materialism itself, to those who believe in the existence of God) 
can forbid our belief in the possibility of a perpetuated conscious- 
ness ; and no hypothesis can assure us of any more than this. 



This appears to me to be only Desire that justifies the hope of 
immortality. The ability to apprehend partly the divine nature, 
and the desire that springs up in the thoughtful mind for the 
divine and the eternal in truth and in life, form together a strong 
presumption in favour of a perpetuated existence. 

I do not fiind that desire for other knowledge affords such a 
presumption. A philosopher who should claim to live on merely 
to enlarge his chemical science, might be thought just as illogical 
in his reasoning as the more passionate children of the earth, who 
are desirous of perpetuating their happiness, or of having a sec- 
ond chance for it. Why should he know more ? Is he to know 
all ? Is he to live on as long as there is any thing to be learned ? 
And live where ? How is he to pursue the thread of this inquiry 
in some other world ? 

But this especial aspiration after knowledge of God stands on 



THE TWO FUTURITIES. 47 

a quite different footing. Other knowledge, you may suppose, 
may increase from age to age ; if we have it not, our posterity 
may ; but here is a want felt imperatively by each reflective soul, 
and which never will be gratified on earth. 

If I were therefore asked for my ground of belief in the sec- 
ond great doctrine of religion, I should say it was involved in the 
first : it follows, I think, as a corollary from a belief in God. 

Nay, even the terrible anxiety which sometimes seizes us to 
know whether a God exists or not, brings with it a sudden and 
imperious conviction in some future condition of our being in 
which we shall know. It M'ould stand alone in nature if a think- 
ing being should be born into this great scheme of things, where 
all is fit and harmonious, with one burning question for ever in 
his heart," which was never to be solved. If I ever touched for a 
moment the borders of complete skepticism, I felt at that moment 
the impossibility that I could altogether die, — that I could be- 
come extinct with this unremoved ignorance upon my soul. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 



I THINK the contemplation of God brings with it this faith. 
The mere imperfections of our happiness here, our bhindering 
lives and inequitable societies, our unrewarded virtues and un- 
avenged crimes, our present need of the great threat of future 
punishments, — these do not, in my estimation, form safe grounds 
to proceed upon. They enter largely as grounds of a popular 
faith, but it would be unwise to build upon them ; because to rest 
on such arguments would lead us to the conclusion, that in pro- 
portion as society advances to perfection, and men are more wise 
and just, in the same proportion will they have less presumption 
for the hope of immortality. 

My friend Clarence insists most strenuously that such are not 
the real and permanent grounds of our Great Plope. It is some- 
times objected to him : " If you could build u]) your terrestrial 
Utopia, — if you could make men wise and happy here, and link 
prosperity uniformly to industry and virtue, you would in reality 
take from the great multitude all that has ever constituted a vig- 
orous faith in immortality, in the Utopia of another world. In 
this your happy state there would be no compensation to expect 
from Heaven for misery endured, no wrongs to be redressed, no 
neglected virtue to be rewarded, no eternal punishments to be 
inflicted, no fear to be felt of that kind whose other pole is a glori- 
ous Hope : nothing, in short, would be left in your Elysium that 
makes the generality of mankind so boldly claim an P21ysium in 
the skies. Your Utopians, at the best, would only dream of im- 
mortality, or speculate upon it ; they could never act or live for 
it." 

" Then they would cease to be Utopians," my friend Clarence 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 49 

would reply ; " for without this great hope of immortality there 
would be little of any greatness, I think, left in the world. Such 
a line of argument," he would continue, " sets a limit to the pro- 
gress oi society, of the following curious description : If there 
should cease to be a certain amount of misery and crime on the 
earth, men would be contented with their transitory lives, and 
they would have no occasion to call down on each other the 
judgments of an after world ; they would therefore relinquish 
the belief in immortality. As this belief (these very reasoners 
admit) is one of the main sources of human virtue and happiness, 
the race would no sooner have reached this point than they must 
descend again to that level of crime and misery in which discon- 
tent and fear of punishment can be again generated. To such a 
conclusion I will by no means subscribe. I do most sincerely 
and most energetically maintain that the hope of immortality is 
not necessarily born of misery or of fear. The eternal and the 
permanent stand contrasted with the transitory and changeful ; 
and a spiritual life — a life of felt relationship with God — grows 
up ever with our knowledge and our happiness." 



As to the argument from the immateriality to the indestructi- 
bility of the soul, it craves wary walking. 

Our very notion of indestructibility is derived from the ma- 
terial atom, which we say the soul is not. We say no material 
substance is destroyed — the form only is changed. But here is 
an immaterial substance which we proclaim to be essentially dif- 
ferent — which, moreover, (unless we believe in the doctrine of 
preexistence,) began to exist, and therefore may cease to exist, 
by other laws than govern the material substance. Am I au- 
thorized to transfer the conclusions derived from the one of these 
to the other ? 

For myself, I am very little interested in these debates about 
the material or immaterial substance. My organic frame, or one 
like it, can, if it please the Creator, be reconstructed in any part 
of the universe. So that if you insist upon the necessity of an 
organic frame to my thinking, even this would not render im- 
possible the perpetuity of my consciousness. There is no neces- 



50 BOOK I.-CHAPTER V. 

sity to suppose that we take anything out of the world, material 
or immaterial. The creation is where God is. 



Mind, I do not dispute the existence of this immaterial essence 
as the seat of the consciousness, nor its indestructible nature ; 
but when difficulties are suggested to me as to this indestructibility 
— when it is suggested to me, that apparently this immaterial 
essence requires the union of an organic frame in order to he 
this seat of consciousness — when it is suggested to me that it 
would be of very little use to carry out, beyond the sphere ot 
gravity, this hcdf of a thinking man, — then I reply. What need 
to carry forth anything beyond the sphere of gravity, or away 
from this earth ? The power that produces can reproduce ; the 
power that produces a consciousness here, can reproduce it else- 
where. Where God is, creation is. 



The hardest trial to our faith is the actual aspect of the living 
multitudes of mankind. Looking round the world, it is very 
hard to find one's immortals, or celestials that are to be. Not 
always do men seem worthy of living even on this earth, which 
one might imagine to be more like heaven, than they are akin to 
angels. Sometimes it rather seems as if the earth were waiting 
for its fit inhabitants, than that its present inhabitants were en- 
titled to spurn the world beneath them in their haste to ascend 
into a better. 

I raise my eyes from my paper, and what a beautiful vision 
lies before me ! The blue sky reflected on these ample waters 
gives me a double heaven — one above and one beneath me ; 
and these islands of enchantment, Ischia and Capri, seem to be 
suspended, floating midway between them. And now the whole 
surface of the sea is glowing like one entire sapphire, on which 
a thousand rainbows have been thrown and broken. 

" Surely," I exclaim, " here, if anywhere, man might have 
been immortal ! " 

Yet if I descend from my solitude, and pass through yonder 
neighbouring city, I shall find myself amidst a noisy, angry, 



i 



THE FUTURE LIFE 51 

quarrelsome multitude, each one of whom would think it the 
grossest insult if I doubted that he was an immortal spirit, 
waiting to put on his angelic nature " in another and better 
world." Pity he cannot put on a little of it here. What does 
this world want but that he and his fellow-men should be some- 
what better than they are ? 



I passed to-day, in my ride, a ragged and filthy group feeding 
like swine under shelter of a ruined wall. The very garbage 
they eat was stolen. They live, or they rot, in pollution of both 
kinds — of soul and of body. Are these our immortals ? — these 
our undeveloped angels ? One must confess, at least, that little 
has been done in this world towards the development of their 
celestial nature. 

Suppose I could fling open the gilded doors of yonder palace ; 
I might find a banquet there fit for the Homeric gods, and verit- 
able nectar flowing copiously enough. Mirth too, and laughter, 
I might hear ; but if I listened to the jests that caused the 
laughter, should I think myself in the presence of gods or 
satyrs ? Is it often that in any of the patrician villas around 
me I should find my immortals ? 



Why must I accept the alternative — all or none ? Why 
every Hun and Scythian, or else no Socrates or Plato ? Why 
must every corrupt thing be brought again to life, or else all 
hope denied to the good and the great, the loving and the pious ? 
Why must I measure my hopes by the hopes I would assign to 
the most weak or wicked of the race ? Let the poor idiot, let 
the vile Tiberius, be extinct for ever — must I, too, and all these 
thoughts that stir in me, perish ? 



Alas ! when I turn the mirror upon myself, w^hat kind of an 
immortal do I find there .'' 

This beautiful external nature, these still waters, these ma- 
jestic hills, I have not been worthy of them. Where was the 



52 BOOK I.— CHAPTER V. 

peace of mind, where the greatness and tranquillity, where the 
noble, free, useful activity which all nature symbolizes ? Not 
in me ! not in me ! or only for an instant. On my best hours 
such little thoughts, such little cares intruded. I have flowed 
weak as water. Any straw could turn me. A jest, a look, a 
laugh, has thrown trouble into my soul ; a pain, a lassitude, a 
sick and morbid feeling, has changed the current of a whole 
philosophy. 

We would be gazing, upward and around, at some divine 
spectacle — «gazing with calm and dilated souls — and lo ! there is 
ever some thorn in the sandal we must first stoop to extract. 



It is night ; I have been looking out upon the stars. What 
other creature than man knows of their wliereabouts, or cares 
to know ? I am a denizen of a wider universe than this earth 
comprises — than this world, as it lies in its own daylight, reveals 
to me. 

I never could look long upon the stars, and not feel that I 
claimed some kindred with the infinite and the eternal. Why 
am I vexed incessantly with this question, " Mortal or immortal," 
if nothing is to come of it ? Or who can think upon that other 
and greater problem — the nature of Him who perchance sits cen- 
tral amidst the stars — and not feel that a creature who can — who 
must — state such problems to himself, is surely destined, one day, 
somewhere, to have them solved for him ? 

Oh yes ! believe it ! — believe it ! — there is an eternal life within 
us. It will burn on ! — it is akin to those stars. 

And, Clarence, you are right. As men grow better on the 
earth, they will grow more confident in their great hope of Im- 
mortality. They will support it in each other and in themselves. 
Have I not said that the aspect of the living world was the con- 
spicuous cause of our despondency ? Here, as elsewhere, we 
meet with that reciprocal action that encounters us throughout in 
this great organic growth of society : the faith that elevates our 
morality is again confirmed and animated by the higher morality 
it has assisted to produce. 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE FUTURE SOCIETY. 



God — Immortality — Progress, these are my three watchwords 
— these are the three great faiths which I desire to keep steadily 
before my mind. Much still remains obscure to me, and would 
remain obscure were I to live to the age of Methuselah, as to the 
precise conception we can permit ourselves to form of God, — as 
to the nature of our Immortal life, — as to the degree and descrip- 
tion of Progress which man is destined to achieve on earth. But 
I can say — and am happy in saying it — that these three faiths 
are mine. 



How inextricably interlaced are all our reasonings upon these 
Two Futurities, the celestial and terrestrial ! I do not say that 
it is impossible to believe in one without the other ; for in some 
aspects they seem to be mutually destructive, while in others 
they lend strength and confirmation to each other. But you can- 
not reason for two seconds upon either of them, without finding 
yourself implicated in some conclusion with regard to the other. 

How the future and unseen world rules over the present ! — 
and again, how the existing society modifies your conceptions of 
that unseen world ! How great a part of life is your faith in im- 
mortality ! And what is immortality but your best life extended ? 
(Always this organic whole, always these related terms, — so re- 
lated that neither exists but by reason of the other.) In our own 
day, in our own country, how Christianity dominates ! What has 
it not dene for society in England ! And what again has society 
and science in England done for this Christianity of our own day 
and country ? 

In vain will you say, in a quite mundane spirit, " Let us con- 



54 BOOK I.— CHAPTER VI. 

struct tlie human and terrestrial society. This plainly is our 
business, whatever else may be. Doubt hangs over other worlds. 
Let us make a happy race on earth." These very men whom 
you would make happy on earth, are half of them looking out 
most anxiously into the skies. They will not sit down with you 
to make laws and government, till you have settled something 
about that other region. Is it all a dream ? Then prove it a 
dream. Here is an element in your society you cannot possi- 
bly ignore. There must be some general vote or voice given in 
this matter. You must have a working majority of the "Ayes" 
or the " Noes," or there will be no society. 

Equally in vain will you say, in a quite spiritual temper, " Let 
each one of us stretch forward to immortality, — let each one of 
us earn, by his virtue and his piety, that eternal future, compared 
to which the whole world is nothing." In doing this — in the very 
process of each man's salvation — the terrestrial society will be 
made (if it is worth the making), and the immortal soul have 
earned its exceeding great reward. That exceeding great reward, 
as you interpret it — that virtue and that intelligent piety which 
you invoke — live only in the hopes and in the minds of men 
whom civihzation has humanized, and science and philosophy 
have instructed. Were the minds of men really limited to their 
voyage to the skies, they would carry up with them a most mis- 
erable cargo. Industrial arts, and many pleasures, and much 
thinking in this lower world, have helped to raise up this benefi- 
cent and intelligent piety. Neglect these, and religion is again a 
degraded thing, — gaunt and haggard, and haunting the tombs 
with the monks of the Thebaid, finding its fit home in the recep- 
tacle of the dead. 

Shall I tell you what religion is in its broadest definition ? It 
is life cultivated under God, and in the presence of death. For- 
get Death, and there would be little or no religion. Forget Life, 
and religion is an empty spectre, — a mere terror, best buried in 
the tomb, which it will then perpetually haunt. 



It is a curious matter for reflection ; but if the j)ietist should 
succeed, by his own teaching, in raising men to that higher moral 



THE FUTURE SOCIETY. 55 

state which he continually has in view, he would be bringing 
about a change in that very teaching by which he now works, 
and must work. If men should be more kindly disposed to each 
other,- — more united, — more intelligent of the public good, — if 
they had advanced thus far, that, in general, they gave a volun- 
tary obedience to laws understood for the good of each and all, — 
that the law, and not the penalty attached to the law, commanded 
their respect, and their rational, chosen obedience, — then it is 
plain that the terrors of the penal code would be mitigated. Few 
terrestrial punishments would be needed. In that case the ter- 
rors of another penal code would be also mitigated. The hope 
of an eternal life would still give wings to all our best and noblest 
thoughts, — sustain and raise us to the highest states of moral wis- 
dom. But a great terror would be no longer needed to prompt 
men to the first stages of virtue, to keep them from violence and 
crime, and a brutish intemperance. A modification in the popu- 
lar faith which would be pernicious noiv, would be inevitable 
then. 

Such is the nature of society. It is an organic whole. You 
cannot understand it otherwise. No part exists but as part of 
this whole. Your religion is framing your social habits ; your 
social habits are framing your religion. Do you want a begin- 
ning or first cause, — some mode of escape from this eternal reci- 
procity, where A is only A because A B exists, and B is only B 
because B A exists ? I can give you no other solution than this, 
that the world commenced in, and proceeds from, a Divine idea ; 
the whole and the parts are simultaneous, inseparable. All be- 
ing, all power as known to us, are but the manifestation of the 
Divine Idea. 

But society is not only an organic whole, it is an organism 
that changes and advances from age to age. The Divine Idea 
develops here in time. Do you complain that nothing is fixed — 
that you cannot embrace it as a permanent whole ? How can 
that be fixed and permanent to you which is still growing, still 
developing itself in the progression of ages ? It is hitherto com- 
plete and permanent only as it exists in those ideas of God, that 
not only fill infinite space, but eternal time. 



56 BOOK I.— CHAPTER VI. 

To quit these very wide generalities for others of a somewhat 
more manageable compass, I can believe in the progress of man- 
kind — progress in the industrial arts, in science, in legislation, in 
morals, in religion — even though I cannot adopt the sanguine 
views of some of my contemporaries — views which now appear 
to me as amiable delusions. They have not always appeared to 
me such delusions. I too, I must confess, have had my dream. 
And though mine was ever a broken slumber, and the bare real- 
ities of hfe would be always peeping in through the curtains of 
my dream, yet it was a long time before I quite extricated 
myself from its spell and fascination. How glorious to believe 
that this humanity of ours, which creeps still too close upon the 
earth, is moulding and growing slowly into a new type of being, 
that it will put forth new powers, and will live some day habitu- 
ally in the higher regions of thought and feeling ! How pleasant 
to shut our eyes on jails, and workhouses, and the miserable 
habitations of the poor, and dream all happy ! — all cheerful, 
active, good, and wise ! How pleasant to believe that a time 
will come when crime and misery will cease with that want, 
with that ignorance, from which they most assuredly proceed ! — 
when all this anxious scramble for necessary aliment will have 
an end ! — when labour will be rationally and cheerfully embraced 
as the beneficent necessity of our terrestrial condition ! — when 
health will not be sacrificed to excessive toil or mischievous 
indulgence ! — when all men will be temperate, active, true, and 
affectionate — each bringing his special contributions to a general 
prosperity which will circulate, like light and heat, freely through 
the world ! Alas ! that there should be fatal objections to these 
philanthropic and prophetic visions. The individual man must 
have the keeping of his own felicity, and he is often a very bad 
custodian of the charge committed to him. Nature does not 
make us all alike. We stumble at the threshold. Society, you 
say, shall care for the weak and the foolish. But if you take 
from the individual man this keeping and charge of his own 
prosperity, what becomes of your society ? All the flutter and 
the toil of that busy human hive, on the continuance of which 
you have been calculating, drops at once ; there is mere sloth 
and torpor. Not a wing is stirring. 



THE FUTURE SOCIETY. 57 

Again we are reminded that society is an organic whole. It 
is society that makes the individual ; it is the individual that 
makes the society. 



Not imaginary felicities, but such as the veritable laws of 
human nature permit, must constitute our ideal of the future 
society. There is no way of developing a great and noble 
society but through the free development of the individual. I 
need not add that the individual man can only develop himself 
socially. The society — speaking of it in its moral aspect — 
forms itself in each man. In each individual there must be the 
impulse for self-advancement or self-sustainment, and also such 
desire for the public good, such love and respect for other men, 
as to render it impossible he should aim at a self-advancement 
that would put him in a state of antagonism to the general good, 
and forfeit for him the esteem of others. Your perfect society 
of twenty men must consist of twenty perfect men. It is well 
to see this clearly, that one may know precisely in what hopes 
one may be indulging. Kemember the twenty men need not be 
all musicians, or all naturalists, nor all care about music or 
natural philosophy, but they must all care about morality. In 
other matters the variety of development, of desire, and of cul- 
ture, constitutes the very life and intellectual opulence of society. 



All these amiable schemes for community of goods, or for 
some system where each labours for some general prosperity 
in which he is partaker, lose sight of the individual, and what is 
necessary for that development of each man on which the whole 
must depend. The true ideal is to be sought, not by instructing 
each man to labour for some general prosperity, in one half of 
the elements of which he has no interest whatever, but in teach- 
ing each man to act and labour for the ends which are to him 
desirable, under equitable conditions, framed for the good of the 
whole. It is these conditions that are to rule in every mind. 
Communism (bear this in mind) either expects that every man 
is to feel an interest in every art and science, in everything that 
3* 



58 BOOK I.— CHAPTER VI. ' 

is valuable to Plumanity ; or else that the individual is energeti- 
cally to devote himself to obtaining a prosperity, one half of 
Avhich he does not participate in, or understand, or care for. 



Communism appears to me eminently unscientific in this other 
respect : it would impose a task on society, acting in its legisla- 
tive or administrative capacity, to which it is altogether incom- 
petent, or which it could perform only by such machinery as 
would crush the development of the individual mind. 

Communism presents us with this general type, varied, of 
course, by each of its teachers. 

A number of men are to labour together for the good of the 
whole — for a common prosperity, which they are to share 
amongst them according to the labour of each. If this pros- 
perity includes all the variety of gratifications of the many 
tastes and desires that grow up in a civiHzed society, half the 
reward of every individual must come in the shape of some- 
thing that he neither understands nor cares for. But supposing 
that the common stock to which he contributes, consists of such 
necessaries of life as eYerj one requires, then it may be admitted 
that each man would have the fullest possible reward for his 
own industry. A solitary man has all the produce of his own 
labour ; but the solitary man, if such a creature can be sup- 
posed to exist, would earn very little by his isolated labour. 
The social man has always hitherto (the very nature of our 
progress entailed this on hira) been compelled to share his 
earnings with those who have not shared in the labour- In the 
scheme of Communism the labour of each man would obtain its 
fullest possible reward, for he would have the whole earnings of 
a social co-operative labourer. He has the advantage of combi- 
nation with his contemporaries, and the advantage of the labour 
and knowledge of preceding ages, and he is remitted to that all 
which the solitary man could claim. He has all a social labourer 
can be said to produce. 

But in order to effect this equitable adjustment, (which still 
can only include the universally desirable,) some governmental 
and administrative machinery must be called in to distribute to 



THE FUTURE SOCIETY. 59 

each man his share from the common stock, and also to appoint 
to each his specific task or labour. A member of such a society 
would be in perpetual tutelage ; continually under the control 
of some governing power, officials or overseers of some descrip- 
tion. If such officials were honest as the day, they would have 
a task imposed on them beyond their power ; and who is to 
guarantee even their perfect honesty ? 



Instead of taking advantage of the spontaneous laws or spon- 
taneous organization of human society, and moulding and im- 
proving this to the best of our ability, we should be attempting to 
supersede these laws by a crude and cumbersome machinery, 
which, just in proportion as it acted at all, would be repressing 
the freedom, the choice, the spontaneous energies of the man. 



Even my friend Clarence, who still clings to some vision of an 
era of partnerships, guilds — I know not what — is most decisive 
in his assertion of this broad principle of freedom for the man, 
and for the family. In his guilds, men are to circulate at their 
option from one to the other. They are voluntary unions of men 
who have learned that union is strength and security. Not regi- 
mented bodies drilled and officered, but a union of men standing 
shoulder to shoulder for mutual support. 



I, for my part, have done with framing new types of society ; 
but I can believe that the best ends of those who frame them will 
be brought about under the system at present existing. 

I do not say absolutely that new forms or types of society will 
not arise. I cannot see sufficiently into the future to make any 
such assertion ; but I am convinced that the one now realized is 
greatly better than any that we, standing here in the nineteenth 
century, can possibly frame or imagine. If in subsequent ages 
a new type should arise, it will be such as we cannot now foresee, 
for it will have arisen out of knowledge and facts which do not at 
present exist. 



60 BOOK I.— CHAPTER VI. 

We are scared and terrified by this odious poverty which 
afflicts and demoralizes so large a portion of society. And if 
some one assures us that new inventions in the various arts are 
pouring abundance of all kinds (of food, and of everything else) 
into society, we refuse to be comforted, because we say that pop- 
ulation increases in a still greater ratio than this abundance. 
There is this prolific nature and her irresistible laws to be en- 
countered. We sink down in despair. 

But it has been shown that the law which Malthus enunciated, 
of the tendency of population to press with increasing severity 
on the means of subsistence, is only true under certain circum- 
stances. Taking in view the whole facts of a progressive society, 
the tendency is precisely the reverse. In every civilized country 
of modern Europe, the means of support have been steadily in- 
creasing in relation to the amount of population. England sus- 
tains her miUions far better than at an earlier period she sustained 
so many thousands. Just as the power and intelligence of a peo- 
ple advance, is the tendency to over-population subdued. Thirty 
Indians in a wood might suffer more from over-population, than 
thirty thousand Americans located in one corner of it. And the 
thirty thousand Americans, if you pen them up, will have such a 
standard of living, such wants and such tastes developed amongst 
them, that celibacy becomes a less evil than poverty. 

The reason why we have still so great a dread of the pressure 
of population is, that we calculate confidently on the elementary 
passions of our nature, but have little or no confidence — have 
often a most unscientific distrust — of the more refined products, 
the tastes, passions, motives, habits, of the social man. It is an 
unscientific distrust, because the strength of these last has often 
been tested ; and because the later, and more refined, and more 
complex conditions of our mind are just as certain — -just as com- 
pletely in the law and order of nature — as our most primitive 
impulses. 

I do not want new types of society, or new laws of property ; 
I only want more property. I want abundance of that kind that 
comes of industry. I want the increased intelligence which will 
certainly accompany such abundance, partly as cause, partly as 
effect. When the artisan or labourer rises into a higher life by 



THE FUTURE SOCIETY. 61 

industry and intelligence, all society rises with him. And in 
obedience to the nature of our great social organism, the intelli- 
gence of all other classes is reacting upon him and his condition. 



But what comes out to me the clearest — what wears to me the 
most important aspect — is that, side by side with a material pros- 
perity, there is a progressive extension of higher modes of think- 
ing. They extend, from the few who already have them, to the 
many. Their extension to the many reacts on the intelligence 
of the few. They extend not only by mere teaching of books, 
and by what is specifically called education, but because those 
conditions of general well-being, so necessary to their develop- 
ment, are extending. 

But into this branch of the subject I feel I cannot enter now. 
It requires a greater concentration of thought than I can at 
present command. It would be necessary to go into some pre- 
liminary discussion of the progressive nature of the individual 
mind ; for of course society is only progressive because each one 
of us is progressive. I should find myself entangled in the old 
labyrinth of metaphysics. I, who can scarce walk at all, and 
only a few steps at a time, should be unwise indeed to enter that 
labyrinth where the more one walks the less chance there is of 
exit or repose. 



BOOK II. 

THE EETROSPECT. 



To muse and brood, and live again in memory." 

Coleridge. 



CHAPTER I. 



CHILDHOOD. 



This morning, as I rode through the country, I saw a young 
mother — her child her only companion — sitting, sewing at her 
cottage door. I was going to say it was quite an English scene, 
as if such a scene was not as universal as human life itself. A 
curly-headed urchin, just master of its plump round legs, had, 
in its play, run to hide itself from its mother round the corner of 
the house. There it stood, both arms extended, flattening itself 
against the wall, in the bright sunshine, and laughing aloud at 
the idea of being out of sight. The pleased mother pretended 
not to have seen the fugitive, pretended not to hear the laugh 
which told her he was safe and close at hand. The child had 
hid itself only to be discovered. It was playing at being lost — 
say rather at being found. Soon the mother would give chase, 
and snatch the little captive in her arras. What a shower of 
kisses was in store — for both ! for both ! 

Oh happy time for mother and for child ! On other occasions, 
as I have passed by this cottage, the mother has been sitting at 
the open window, and the child amusing itself, as if alone, in the 
garden — absorbed with no mortal could say what — busy at some 
structure of strange device — dirt, sticks, straws mingled together 
for some architectural purpose, hidden from all eyes but its own. 
That cottage garden has often led back my thoughts to my own 
childhood,'and my own early home. 

I, who have so short a time to live, feel as old men feel. I 
find myself, for hours together, travelling through a retrospect of 
the past. I can now understand and forgive the garrulity of old 
age, which dwells for ever on scenes of boyhood and of youth. 
Memory, and not hope, has become the star of life. Have 



^Q BOOK II.— CHAPTER I. 

patience with the old man : he must pause, and turn, and look 
behind: there lies for him the "happy valley," if anywhere on 
earth. When we have bade farewell to all our joys, there is yet 
another parting almost as sad — our farewell to the memory of 
them. What hosts of long-forgotten things rush from their 
hiding-places to look at me once more, and for the last time ! 



It is always a most curious spectacle to watch a child alone at 
play, and see it contriving pleasures and mimic business for itself. 
It is marvellous what imagination does for this little poet, who 
works, not with words, but creates strange visions for itself out 
of sticks, and stones, and straws. Dive if you can into the ur- 
chin's mind, and follow to its source that exclamation of joy and 
surprise which a mere nothing has called forth ! It is a most 
curious spectacle. But when, at the same time, we call to mind 
that we ourselves have been just such another charming simple- 
ton, there arises before us one of the most fascinating of day- 
dreams which the grown-up man can indulge in. It is veritably 
a fairyland we are peeping into. 

Yes, we have all been fairies once. And now, as we go wan- 
dering back over the fields of memory, we stoop and pick up the 
acorn cups, and marvel how we ever crept into them, and found 
them, as we assuredly did, most rare and spacious habitations. 



Well, I have been happy once ! I have been a child ! — I 
have been in heaven ! I have stood in the smile, and lain in the 
arms of one of God's angels. I was the happy child of a gentle 
and loving mother. 

Oh, that garden of my early home, where I and the flowers 
grew up together ! I and Time were playfellows then ; I feared 
him not. Truly has it been said that the man becomes " a slave 
to Time." He is a slave to the hour and his work, and whether 
the sun sinks before the task is done — or (fate still harder to 
bear) the task is done before the sun has set — he is alike miser- 
able. I once saw a picture which had for its subject an hour- 
glass standing upon some sort of pedestal, and a child looking 



CHILDHOOD. 67 

calmly and steadfastly at it. In vain — so I interpreted the pic- 
ture — in vain the sands were falling fast and unremittingly ; the 
child looked calmly on. What did it care for Time ? It was 
not afraid of all its past, or all its coming hours, still less that the 
hours would cease to flow for it. In one sense the child is living 
in eternity. With all its microscopic vision, it has no bounds to 
its future. Insect-like, it beats its little wing in the quite limit- 
less air. 

How vividly I remember that daisied lawn, those tall white 
lilies, those glowing peonies, those tulips which are nothing in 
the world unless you can peep close into their cups — cups full to 
the brim with beauty. We men outgrow the flower. What ar- 
cades, what bowers, what triumphal arches they once reared for 
us ! I can remember walking under the scarlet and purple blos- 
soms of the fuchsia, and seeing the light fall on them through the 
green leaves above — I see it now. How they glow in that green 
and golden light which falls on them through the leaves ! Mil- 
ton's angels never had half so much joy in their "jasper pave- 
ment and amaranthine flowers ! " Amaranthine ! that surely 
was a mistake of the poet. It is the perishable blossom that is 
so preeminently beautiful. Amaranthine flowers ! It is very 
like eternal tinsel — neither death nor life. Wish for no ama- 
ranths ; wish rather to be a child again, and see the blossoms of 
the fuchsia, half of them beneath your feet, and half of them just 
above your head. 

But the light of that garden, and the light of all the world to 
me, was the mother's smile, the mother's love. My eyes fill 
with tears, at this distance of time, when I think what a tender, 
constant, unpretending, and yet infinite love it was that she bore 
to me — for the most part a silent affection, uttered perpetually in 
acts of kindness, never clamorous in words, expressed oftenest in 
the quiet kiss. To all persons she was kind and gentle, to me 
invariably so. I can recall some expressions of sadness, not one 
of anger. A shade of melancholy had settled on her, owing to 
her early widowhood. My father, of whom I have no recollec- 
tion, was a lieutenant in the navy, and lost his life, a few years 
after his marriage, — not " gloriously," as it is called — not in bat- 



68 BOOK II.— CHAPTER I. 

tie, but by a fever caught as his ship lay rotting in the hot sun 
off the coast of Africa. And yet it tvas a glorious death ; for he 
was there upon as noble a service as ever ship of war has been 
employed in — that of preventing the slave-trade. His death 
threw a shadow over my mother's spirit which never dispersed, 
and which yet never darkened into gloom. Her sorrow found 
its solace in that Christian faith, and piety, and love, which she 
kept as the secret treasure of her heart. 

I say " secret," because there were few persons whom she 
knew to whom she was likely to express herself without reserve ; 
and because, moreover, there is in deep love, of all kinds, a cer- 
tain reticence which forbids the loud and common utterance of it. 
To me, child as I was, she would pour out her full heart of piety. 
I have a dim remembrance of sitting up before her on the table, 
while, with her arms about me, she murmured out her passion of 
divine love into my wondering ear. She thought that thus it 
might penetrate into the spirit of her little charge, and that her 
words might one day come back to memory, with a much fuller 
meaning than they had when first heard. What was gathered 
from that soft mysterious murmur, it would be hard to say ; but 
my arms were round her neck whilst she was sweetly murmur- 
ing on, and nothing but love of some kind could be stealing into 
my soul. 

She taught me to love all things, all living creatures, and to 
find beauty where I should else have never looked for it. She 
taught me to give pain to no sentient thing, to inflict no suffering, 
if possible, on any fellow-mind. She made me understand that 
there was a spirit of love abroad through all the universe, and in 
the Author of it all ; that I must be like it, if I would be good or 
happy; if like it, I should live in peace for evermore. 



Very little " knowledge of the world," I fear, had the dear 
mother to boast of. She had a vague terror of that tumultuous 
life to which she would soon have to commit her son. But the 
workings of the selfish, sordid, angry, and violent passions, how 
could she, who shared them so little, comprehend ? She knew as 
little of them in reality, as some scared bird that wings its way 



CHILDHOOD. 69 

over a battle-field, knows of the dreadful contest that is raging 
' beneath. How far she could have prepared, or armed me, for 
the actual conflict of life, it will not do, perhaps, to inquire. Very 
little of that conflict have I been called upon to sustain. She was 
one of whom it might truly be said, she was in the world, but not 
of the world. A daughter of Eve, she shared the general penalty 
— she, too, was banished ; but you would say that she was still 
nothing less than the exile from Paradise. The land of inno- 
cence was her native home ; she had the air, and manner, and 
spoke the language of that foreign country. 

Other conflicts than those of active life were destined to be 
mine, — conflicts which she could still less foresee, and quite as 
little provide against. Yet even over these her spirit has perpet- 
ually hovered. No rude iconoclast could I ever have been, — no 
desecrator of the temple. I needed no image or beautiful picture 
of the Madonna, to sanctify its walls for me. I saw her kneeling 
at the shrine. She had worshipped there. The ground to me 
was for ever sacred. How far one spirit such as hers, how far 
it goes to make for us a faith in Heaven ! 

I should suspect myself of speaking extravagantly, and out of 
the ignorance, as well as the affection, of childhood, if it were not 
that, at a maturer period of my life, I have had other opportuni- 
ties of studying the same character. Such beautiful natures do 
exist amongst us. I have seen in other women the same serene 
devotedness ; I have seen the same piety, which, whatever form 
it assumed, had its root in love ; the same quiet fulness of heart, 
diffusing some degree of happiness to all around, but wrapping 
the child of its care in the very mantle of affection. What God 
has given to us in this sweet maternal heart, it is very marvellous 
to think of. 



On looking back to those days, I can now understand how I 
also made her happiness, as she mine. I must suppose that there 
were childish fits of petulance on my part, and sometimes acts of 
insubordination, but I do not remember them. I can recall only 
scenes of peace, — the lesson and the play hour, which were but 
varied pleasures. How entirely content, it now occurs to me, we 



70 BOOK II.— CHAPTER I. 

both were, when on some winter evening I sat by her side, with 
the large pictured Bible outspread before me on the table, or 
knelt up upon the chair, the better to command that captivating 
folio. Some of those pictures live at this moment more vividly 
in my memory than any I have seen in the famous galleries of 
Rome and Florence. Even now I see David playing on his harp 
before king Saul ; and I see Saul consulting the Witch of Endor, 
and the terrible ghost of Samuel rising in the background. How 
that ghost haunted me ! Well may I remember those pictures, 
for I never studied any others so intensely. How I laboured to 
extract from them all some intelligible story ! And, doubtless, I 
often perplexed the dear mother herself with my minute inquiries, 
and the unreasonable desire I had to know what every man and 
woman in the picture was doing, and why he did it, and why God 
let him do it. 

Days of illimitable faith ! were they indeed mine ! How glad 
I am to have known them ! Not all that we resign, do we regret 
to have possessed. Very singular and very pleasing to me is the 
remembrance of that simple piety of childhood, of that prayer 
which was said so punctually, night and morning, kneeling by the 
bedside. What did I think of, guiltless then of metaphysics, — 
what image did I bring before my mind as I repeated my learnt 
petition with scrupulous fidelity ? Did I see some venerable 
Form bending down to listen ? Did He cease to look and listen 
when I had said it all ? Half prayer, half lesson, how ditfi- 
cult it is now to summon it back again ! But this I know, that 
the bedside where I knelt to this morning and evening devotion, 
became sacred to me as an altar. I smile as I recall the innocent 
superstition that grew up in me, that the prayer must be said 
kneeling just there. If, some cold winter's night, I had crept into 
the<t)ed, thinking to repeat the petition from the warm nest itself 
— it would not do ! — it was felt in this court of conscience to be 
"an insufficient performance;" there was no sleep to be had till 
I had risen, and, bed-gowned as I was, knelt at the accustomed 
place, and said it all over again from the beginning to the end. 
To this day I never see the little clean white bed in which a child 
is to sleep, but I see also the figure of a child kneeling in prayer 
at its side. And I, for the moment, am that child. No high 



CHILDHOOD. 71 

altar in the most sumptuous church in Christendom, could prompt 
my knee to bend like that snow-white coverlet, tucked in for a 
child's slumber. 



Life in our pretty cottage passed uniformly enough, — that is, 
it seems uniform now. I, at the time, found an endless variety 
in it. The event, however, that was looked forward to with the 
greatest interest, was an occasional visit to the large house of my 
uncle. Sir Thomas Moberly, — Sutton Manor, as it was called, — 
and which stood in its owai park, near the bank of the Thames. 
My uncle was a wealthy man ; hospitable, kind, a little pompous, 
proud of his pedigree, a member of Parliament withal, and hugely 
solicitous to stand high in the county. His secret ambition, as I 
discovered at a later time, was to change his baronetcy into a 
peerage. A most delusive hope as it seemed to me, and to others, 
who could still better judge of the ability and influence he could 
bring into Parliament. But I have no wish here to draw the 
character of my very good uncle. He was fond of my mother ; 
she had been his favourite sister ; and though he was very wroth 
with her for throwing herself away, as he described it, on a pen- 
niless lieutenant, he had never ceased to think kindly of her. 
After the death of her husband, he was continually pressing her 
to come to Sutton Manor. My mother left her own home with 
reluctance. To me such visits were the great epochs by which 
all the chronology of the year was regulated. 

The house might well attract me, for it was what here, in Italy, 
would be called a palace, and it was full of pictures. In the front 
of it lay a noble park, in wdiich stood great oaks of fabulous age, 
— each one filling, as it were, whole acres of the green pasture 
with its single presence. The park sloped down -to the river- 
side. There were two approaches to the house ; one by an open 
carriage-way through the park ; the other a devious and private 
entrance through the winding paths of a shrubbery, where every 
graceful tree, I think, that could bear the climate of England, had 
been collected. This shrubbery was a quarter of a mile in length, 
and terminated in a country lane, — the gate being just opposite 
the village church. No lodge had been built at this entrance ; 



72 BOOK II.-CHAPTER I. 

the old rustic gate had been sedulously preserved, and every 
thing done to retain an air of privacy. This park and this shrub- 
bery were my great delight, and became so more and more every 
successive year that I visited them. But house and pictures, 
park and shrubbery, all yielded to yet another attraction, which 
also grew more powerful every successive year, — my little cousin 
"Winifred. 

Ah me ! how should I know that, cousins though we were, 
there were yet social distinctions that would place an insuperable 
barrier between us ? "I was a gentleman," as Passanio says in 
the play, but the daughter and sole offspring of Sir Thomas 
Moberly, baronet, was plainly marked out, by all the rules of 
society, for a wealthier gentleman than the simple and untitled 
Bassanio. Some poet sings, — 

" Yet such is nature's laAv divine, that those 
Who grow together cannot choose but love." 

I loved you, Winifred, before I knew what love was ; how could 
I know that love was forbidden ? 

We have played together — I wonder, Winifred, if you still 
remember it as I do — we have ran laughing together under the 
same skipping-rope. I see in imagination two merry children 
coursing along the smooth turf, and the rope flying over their 
heads. Each holds in one hand a handle of the skipping-rope ; 
each has one arm locked round the waist of his companion. 
They have no thought but of holding fast, and keeping step and 
time, as the rope flies round, and they dance onwards under it, 
laughing and singing. I hear their voices, but they are so 
blended that I cannot listen to the one or the other. 

A lady calls from the terrace — it is my ever-watchful mother 
— " Charles take care of Winifred ! See that she does not fall ! " 
I do not think the admonition at all necessary. Charles would 
have suffered every limb in his body to be broken, rather than 
her little finger should be hurt. 



CHAPTER 11. 



THE STUDENT. 



Well, that cottage-home, and all its happiness, was gone. 
The boy had not yet ripened into youth, when the spirit of the 
place took her flight to heaven. 

I will not — even at this distance of time, I dare not — dwell 
on that distress. I will not again, in imagination, turn the 
handle of that chamber-door ! — that chamber in which I once 
entered stealthily at midnight, and, placing my light at the bed- 
side, took a cold hand in mine, which for the first time returned 
no kindly pressure. The candle burnt down to the socket ; the 
day broke through the chinks of the closed shutters. Nothing 
but a strong repugnance to be discovered there — to encounter 
any living being in that chamber, prevailed upon me to quit it, 
and carry my tears to my own solitary room. 

I was transferred to the guardianship of my uncle. He was 
kind ; he received me as one of his own family, and set about 
schemes for my education and future career. My " prospects," 
as they are called, were not likely to suffer from this transference 
to my uncle's roof. He would doubtless have done much to serve 
me, if I had been one of those capable of being served. Mean- 
while the shy lad he had received into his house brought such a 
wounded spirit with him, and such passionate regrets, that he 
must have been, I fear, a very undesirable inmate. One person 
only seemed fully to tolerate and sympathize with my griefs, and 
this was my cousin Winifred. 

Of my aunt, Lady Moberly — were I disposed to sketch her 
character — I could say nothing but what was commendable ; only 
the commendable qualities moved within narrow limits, such as 
were drawn by a very restricted intelligence. It is well she does 



74 BOOK II.— CHAPTER II. 

not look over my pen, for she happens to pride herself especially 
upon her intelligence. A certain cleverness and vivacity of mind 
she indisputably possesses. 

Lady Moberly, in fact, is one of those characters very frequent 
at present amongst us ; and although, for this very reason, they 
may be especially fitted for the study of a philosopher, they do 
not afford materials for an interesting description. She took her 
place in the fashionable world ; she also took a recognized posi- 
tion in the evangelical world. These two strokes being given, 
the rest of the portrait may easily be traced. All her notions 
or opinions were sharply defined, which did not prevent them 
from being as distinctly incongruous. She used to speak indul- 
gently of my mother, but always treated her as one sadly lax 
and deficient on doctrinal points. She herself bristled on all 
sides with such " doctrinal points." She was an exemplary 
woman — loved her husband, loved her child, and was a perfect 
slave to her own good character — most doctrinal, most unspivitusd. 
What is impossible in logic, is precisely the commonplace of real 
life. 



How desolately I wandered now through that great house ! 
The liveried servants, with their pompous servility, which I 
suppose had pleased me when I was a child, now caused me 
nothing but embarrassment. I remember that I would search 
distractedly over the whole place for what I wanted, or have 
recourse to the most absurd expedients, rather than ask them 
to get or to do any thing for me. How differently was all this 
managed in the old home ! There a kindly spirit had solved a 
difficult problem, without knowing perhaps there was a problem 
to be solved. No one could be more respected than my lady 
mother, and no one shrunk more sensitively from what true taste 
or refinement would condemn ; yet all beneath her roof lived as 
one family. It was a friendly service that a domestic rendered 
me ; 1 asked for it without restraint, and it was given with some- 
thing of a kindly feeling. Here every order or instruction was 
cold and brief as a military word of command, and obeyed in the 
same military spirit, I felt that beneath all their show of defer- 
ence, I was the object of secret ridicule with these liveried people 



THE STUDENT. 75 

themselves, because I could not assume towards them this brief, 
cold, military tone of command. 

Yet let me not do injustice to a whole class. A kindly heart 
may beat even under tags and gold lace ; and amidst this pomp- 
ously servile crew I found my good friend Bernard. On one 
occasion, a few unaffected words of frank communication won 
me his heart ; and whenever I used to visit Sutton Manoi^, he 
took it upon himself to look especially after my interests. "When 
he heard that I was ill, he begged to be sent to take care of me ; 
and a better nurse no patient ever had. 



But meanwhile the important affair of my education was to 
be determined on. I had hitherto — much to my uncle's great dis- 
gust — been kept at home, and studied under private tutors. Eton 
w^as the only place in which he thought that a gentleman's son 
should be educated. It was ruled, however, that it was too late 
to send me to Eton. I w^as put under the care of the Reverend 
Mr. Springfield, a clergyman who resided some twenty miles off, 
to be prepared as speedily as possible for Oxford. 

And accordingly to Mr. Springfield's I went, and there I 
studied diligently enough, making perhaps a more varied use of 
his extensive library than he was aware of. 

Here I had one fellow-pupil, w^ho, as much almost as Mr. 
Springfield's library, assisted in my mental culture. Luxmore 
was somewhat in advance of me in years, and considerably so in 
his knowledge of books. Passionately devoted to poetry — the 
rock, alas ! on which he split — he introduced me to all his fa- 
vourite authors ; Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and the rest. 
How I devoured them ! Many were the controversies we held 
on their comparative merits. 

Dear Luxmore ! dear poet, as I must call you, though the 
world would not recognize your claim to the title — would that I 
could shake you once more by the hand, and hear you pour 
forth your delightful rhapsodies ! No systematic thinker, like 
Clarence, my poet-friend, greedy of intellectual excitement, 
clutched at everything — in every creed, in every school — that 
stirred his spirit. He was a veritable pupil of the nineteenth 



76 BOOK II.— CHAPTER II. 

century, full of piety, full of doubt — now all for faith, now all 
for science. We suited admirably. Our differences only served 
to elicit and kindle thought. We worshipped together at many 
a shrine. What a demi-god to us was the great writer we 
admired ! 

There was already this difference between us, — that some 
inexplicable tendency was ever guiding me to that shelf in the 
library where the philosophers stood ranged. Even the poet's 
verse ceased to please, when it contradicted what seemed to me 
to be the truth. Luxmore, on the contrary, yielded himself 
entirely to the poet. He was impatient of any analytic exami- 
nation. Say there was an error in the very tissue of the poem, 
he would himself detect and canvass it some other day. But 
while the poet was in favour, he would tolerate no cavil or 
objection. Hence many a brave battle between us ! He, in 
derision, dubbed me " the philosopher." I retorted upon him 
the title of " the poet." Our derisive compliments were perhaps 
not altogether displeasing to our secret vanity. Luxmore was 
already burning to distinguish himself as a poet ; whilst I had 
formed some vague notion that I would devote myself to phy- 
losophy. Much we have either of us done with our poetry, or 
our philosophy ! 

Wordsworth's ode, for instance, on the "Intimations of Im- 
mortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," afforded us 
an arena for this species of controversy. In that ode, Words- 
worth converts the very susceptibility of the young senses into 
some sort of argument whereby to disparage the senses them- 
selves. I forget how, at that time, I framed my objection ; but 
I well remember that, in spite of the beauty of the poem, I could 
not reconcile myself to the palpable extravagance of ranking the 
infant higher than the man — making the thoroughly sensuous 
little creature the more spiritual of the two. Luxmore was out 
of all patience with my prosaic, miserable objections — " fit only 
for a Benthamite," or a " rank materialist." He maintained that 
the leading idea of the poem was as just and subtle, as the verse 
throughout was exquisitely melodious ; and he always completed 
his argument by ringing out the stanzas triumphantly in my ear. 
Yet at another time, under the influence of other teachers — but 



THE STUDENT. 77 

why follow this out ? Dear Luxmore, I would give half I pos- 
sess if I could hear you ring out those stanzas again with your 
old triumphant dogmatism. 



The last six months of my pupilage were spent alone. Lux- 
more had gone up to Oxford. 

Books ! books ! books ! — poetical, theological, philosophical, 
obtained often by daring inroads into the very recesses of Mr. 
Springfield's library — books, and solitary rambles in the country, 
formed the staple of my existence. And now I also was consid- 
ered ripe to pass on to Oxford ; I was liberated from Mr. 
Springfield's vicarage, where I had remained stationary, with 
very few intervals of relaxation, for about three years. 

It seemed to me as a matter of course that I should spend the 
ensuing vacation at Sutton Manor. It struck me, therefore, as 
rather strange that, on quitting Mr. Springfield's for the last 
time, I should receive from Lady Moberly what read very like 
a formal letter of invitation. There were a few lines in the 
postscript which seemed quite enigmatical : " If you should find," 
thus ran the postscript, " that your favourite park and shrubbery 
are haunted by a certain fairy of the place, do not let this too 
much disturb your studies. Make the sign of the cross, or repeat 
any form of exorcism that your learned books may have taught 
you, and doubtless this same fairy will vanish from your path. 
By no means let it haunt you." 

I paid no heed at the time to this enigmatical postscript. I 
recollect that, on arriving at Sutton Manor, I let the carriage 
take my baggage up to the house by the more public drive, and 
walked myself through the devious paths of the shrubbery. It 
was a bright summer's day, and its shady avenues were particu- 
larly agreeable. They were the more so because the trees were 
not planted so thick as to shut out the breeze, or entirely exclude 
the sunshine. I can see before me the beech-trees playing with 
the light, their leaves now tossing it from you, now reflecting it 
on you, till you ask if it was most light or shadow that the leaf 
was making. As I strolled leisurely on, I came to a seat formed 
of the stump of a departed elm-tree, which the moss had over- 



78 BOOK IL-CHAPTER II. 

grown. Some one had been lately occupying it, for a book lay 
upon the moss, with a whole handful of roses piled up upon the 
open page to keep the place. I might have known that none but 
a fairy would have used such a marker. A book was always an 
irresistible temptation — let alone the roses. I must stop and 
look at it. It was a volume of Scott. I had soon taken my 
seat on the mossy trunk, engrossed in the Lay of the Last Min- 
strel. 

How long the fascination of that poet had held me, I cannot 
say; but when I lifted up my ej'^es from the page — lo ! there 
stood before me the veritable fairy — the baronet's daughter and 
my sweet cousin Winifred. She had returned for her book. 
Finding how I was engaged, she stood smiling before me, in 
playful mood, waiting to see how long she might remain there 
looking on, and herself unseen. She started, and blushed a 
little, I think, amidst her laughter, when our eyes met. How 
beautiful she had grown ! My little cousin — so late my play- 
mate — how my heart bounded, how it trembled before you ! 

I had forgotten to make the sign of the cross, or use any form 
of exorcism. That fairy has haunted me for ever since. 

How very beautiful she had grown ! And there she stood, in 
no stately drawing-room, but in the greenwood, with the hght of 
heaven playing on her open brow, and on that fair head ; for I 
well remember that, to enjoy the breeze and freedom of the 
place, she had taken off her hat, and hung it by the strings, 
basket-fashion, on her arm. She stood before me in the free 
air, and in the golden light of day ; and the poet — the truest- 
hearted and most chivalrous of poets — was our only master of 
the ceremonies. It was fortunate for me that he came to our 
rescue : I could pour out on him, and on his heroines, the lan- 
guage of admiration. Never was poet so much extolled — never 
so completely forgotten. 



We often afterwards met in that shrubbery — walked there 
and talked. What poetry we more than talked — we lived ! No 
antique grove devoted to god or goddess was ever more sacred 
than those shady avenues became to me. And, indeed, this early 



THE STUDENT. 79 

love, so pure and so devoted, is more akin to worship than any 
thins: else to which I can resemble it. 



On my part, truly, a mere worship, where even the prayer 
was not to be spoken. I came to understand the full meaning 
of the enigmatical postscript. 

Whether, under any circumstances, I should have sprung for- 
ward on some active and ambitious career in life, may be doubt- 
ful. But this hopeless yet (as I thought) unconquerable love, 
certainly helped to extinguish whatever spirit of ambitious enter- 
prise I might otherwise have felt. When I left Sutton Manor 
for Oxford, and installed myself in the cloisters of Magdalen, I 
was as indifferent to the world as any monk of the fourteenth 
century could have been. Academical honours, or the greater 
distinctions in life for which they prepare the way, had no sort 
of charm for me. The " daily bread " was secured, and neither 
law, physic, nor divinity could have given me my Winifred. 
There was, however, one other passion stirring in my soul — for 
it amounted to a passion — the desire for what I must call philo- 
sophic truth. Books that treated on the nature of the human 
mind, on the great problems of God, and this world of nature 
and of man, had for me an increasing and absorbing interest. 



" This mere reflective life," I would sometimes say to myself, 
" must then be my portion. Poets and philosophers, all who 
gloriously sing, and all who analyze and explain — these must be 
my companions." — Thus, instead of the special studies of the 
place, poetry and philosophy alternately occupied my mind. 
Scarcely can I say " alternately," for where are the elements of 
poetry to be found more abundantly than in philosophy itself? 
or where is the heart so profoundly stirred as in precisely the 
most abstruse problems of thought ? 

Vain and most groundless seems to me that alarm one often 
hears from men trembling at each assault on some time-honoured 
system, some venerable solution of these unexhausted problems. 
These alarmists fear that, their solution being laid aside, the 



80 BOOK II.— CHAPTER II. 

minds of men will be given up entirely to sordid passions, and 
the mere tyranny of the senses. But the problems themselves 
remain. Never can the human mind — the mind of humanity — 
rest lethargic in the presence of them. Sweep from the world 
every system that is taught in your schools, in your colleges, in 
your temples — let every echo die away along the sacred walls ; 
and, before the sun goes down, there shall be some new doctrine 
thundering from the roof — ay, and a thousand whispered contra- 
dictions circling, as now, round the pillars and along the aisles. 

All that we think has sprung from Humanity. But Humanity 
does not always recognize herself in her own works. The still 
water looks with wonder on the fountain playing from its own 
surface. The next moment it may itself be the fountain. 



If Luxmore had not preceded me, I know not how I should 
have gained a single friend or acquaintance at Oxford. At his 
rooms I occasionally met with Clarence, whose intimacy I often 
took myself to task for not cultivating more sedulously. Lux- 
more himself I would willingly have grappled to my heart, and 
made a friend indeed ; but he was much occupied in his own 
poetical enterprises; and besides, there were others about him 
who probably interested him far more than I could hope to do. 

Independently of the influence that reigned at Sutton Manor, 
my very course of museful study was shutting me up in solitude, 
imprisoning me as within viewless walls. The moment I came 
into my own solitary cell, a feeling of restraint fell off me, and I 
seemed then only to breathe freely. I felt as if some magic cir- 
cle was being drawn around me, cutting me off from frank and 
cordial communication with others. But I had made no effort to 
escape. The enchantment was too strong to leave me any great 
desire to break from it. Luxmore, in one of his snatches of 
verse, has described this state of mind in which you still crave 
sympathy and fellowship, yet feel that you cannot break some 
invisible chain that will not let you give yourself frankly to 
another, — 

" When I look without, when I look without, 
How bitterly my swelling heart reproves 



THE STUDENT. 81 

A world where no man calls me friend, 
And where no woman loves ! 

When I look within, when I look within, 
Back on myself the keen reproach is driven; 

'Tis I that cannot he a friend, 
And love is felt — not given." 

When the long vacation came round, that house which, in 
common parlance, was called my home, was not indeed closed to 
me, but was made difficult of entrance, embarrassing and peril- 
ous, by the very attractions it possessed. I, if I pleased, might 
love my fair cousin to my heart's content — or its destruction — 
that was my affair ; but I must not ask my cousin to return this 
love. I understood that a tacit obligation of this kind had been 
imposed upon me. When, therefore, the vacation arrived, I gen- 
erally gave out that I should betake myself to Wales or Cum- 
berland, or some such retreat, to " read," as the phrase runs. 
My uncle probably interpreted this to mean, that with two or 
three others, I should go and read with a tutor, as the custom is. 
Meanwhile I went alone into my mountain retreat, wdth a box 
full of quite other than academical books. Such box of books 
was my sole companion. 



In the season, as it is called, the Moberleys occupied their 
house in town. In Lady Moberley's drawing-room I have had 
some opportunities of seeing what is especially called Society, 
and might have circulated, had I desired, through a considerable 
cycle of it. I have been always glad that I had a glance at this 
kind of life, and a glance was sufficient. For me there was 
more excitement to be got out of any dingy book, thumbed over 
by a solitary rushlight, than from fifty ball-rooms. 

" Well," I have said to myself, as I returned from such scenes, 
" I must live then in solitude — say rather in companionship with 
the noblest minds, speaking to me in their noblest moods. This 
is highest society — society of the truly great. What nobility and 
what royalty can compare with these ? Kings and emperors ! 
I live with the kings and emperors of the realm of thought. 
Nay, is it not the chariot of the sun-bright god himself that I 

4* 



82 BOOK II.— CHAPTER II. 

ascend, when I ride with the spirit of the poet, and survey and 
comprehend the wide world beneath us ? It has ever been be- 
lieved that by knowledge we become as gods." — Ah me ! it is not 
kings or emperors that we want, or the chariot of a god. I 
have lived to sigh for any peasant's hut, with a friend in the 
chair before me. 



Our own hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland were most 
frequently my place of refuge. No scenes have given me more 
lasting pleasure. The mountains, it is said, are not lofty enough 
for sublimity. But as the light and cloud play on them, and 
they arise around you in dark, or silver, or purple masses, the 
eifect is very magical — under certain lights, even perfectly sub- 
lime. Scenes more spiritual Switzerland itself could hardly pro- 
duce. But all comparisons are futile, r We grow to love a 
country, as we grow to love a person, because we have there ex- 
ercised our faculty of loving. Nowhere to me has nature been 
more kindly beautiful. And who has not noticed how all the 
pleasing accessories of a fertile and homely landscape gain infi- 
nitely by their union with the mountain-ranges ? The stream 
runs conscious of the purple hills ; every tree and flower has 
something more than its own beauty, when it grows in the 
shadow, or in the light, of the glorious mountains. Wherever 
they rear their mystic summits to the clouds, there is an inde- 
scribable commingling of heaven and of earth. The mountain 
is the religion of the landscape. 



Amongst these hills I wandered, with thoughts gathered some- 
times from Emmanuel Kant, sometimes from sages nearer home, 
sometimes from the sciences of Lyell, and Owen, and Faraday. 
I was striving, by what plastic power was in me, to piece to- 
gether into some consistent whole, the rich materials which the 
age in which w^e live throws before us all. 

I see myself, perched up amongst the crags, a stray solitary 
speck of humanity, mightily concerned about the origin and end 
of all things. This is my task — the business of my life, — to un- 
derstand what I can of this world in which I have been born — 



THE STUDENT. 83 

of its past history — of the past history of mankind, and whatever 
may be gathered from the past, of prediction for the future. 
Something, too, may be said — a word spoken, that may help 
in some infinitesimal proportion, in this multifarious business of 
a world's progress. 

Then I reflected upon my own position in the social scheme. 
Some intellectual labour, I said, must be mine ; how else could I 
justify the manumission I enjoyed from all manual crafts, the 
toils of the field, or what to me wore a far more terrible aspect, 
the toils of trade and commerce ? No especial department of 
science was I likely to advance. I felt no aptitude for ingenious 
experiment, or minute observation. Nature had not fitted me 
for the laboratory, or the dissecting-room. The geologist's ham- 
mer would have been a useless instrument in my hand ; in vain 
should I have collected weeds or insects. To as little purpose 
should I have turned the leaves of innumerable lexicons — I who 
turn the leaves of the dictionary seven times to the same spot, 
and have still to turn them in chase of the same word. A 
learned man in the ordinary acceptation of the term, I could not 
be. One only scheme of study lay open to me — " There shall be 
no great idea," I said to myself, " wrought out in any department 
of science ; there shall be no great or important conclusion ar- 
rived at by the philologist, the antiquarian, or the historical 
critic, that I will remain ignorant of In presence of the man 
of erudition, or the scientific professor, I must always be a pupil ; 
but I will be a pupil in every class ; I will catch the last word 
uttered in every schoolroom." 



How often is the last word that falls from the professor's 
chair — a doubt ! — a suggestion to prompt to farther examination, 
not a conclusion that can be forthwith applied to the building up 
of your system. Such scheme of study, however, I cannot, as I 
now look back upon it, but approve. It gave a method to my 
reading. And it seemed a modest scheme. I found it more 
* difficult of accomplishment, the farther I advanced in it. 

Then, for that system to be constructed by the aid of all these 
teachers — I read, I thought, I wrote, I destroyed. How often 
did it seem I had to begin it all afresh ! 



84 BOOK II.-CHAPTER II. 

I have done nothing. 

"Well, there are braver men in England, bolder and stronger, 
who are at work in every department of thought. 



Yes, marvellous is the varied intellectual power at work 
around us, elevating us all. 

I have never been wanting in reverence : I have been always 
willing to learn, and to admire. Fond of pursuing my own re- 
flections, and initiated early into metaphysical studies, which 
more than any other prompt to independent thinking, I was not 
likely to sink into the habit of being merely a passive recipient 
of the knowledge of others. All the more do I congratulate 
myself that I did not fall into the opposite error of involving 
myself in some favourite subject of speculation, and neglecting 
to understand, and by understanding to appreciate, the various 
labours and the various knowledge of mankind. I never see a 
bridge spanning the river, nor a railroad sweeping over the 
country, that I do not reflect with admiration on the science and 
skill of the engineer, and on that noble audacity of enterprise 
which his skill and science have given him. All men are ready 
to extol the sublime task-work of the astronomer ; how, on the 
one hand, he has dealt with space and number, determining their 
inevitable relations, and then, by means of nicest observation, 
has laid his mathematical theorems by the side of nature's work, 
and detected the secret method of her movements ; but all men 
are not equally ready to applaud the labours of the chemist in 
his laboratory, or of the anatomist in the dissecting-room. Yet 
here, too, have been thought the most subtle, and perseverance 
truly heroic. They, too, were God-inspired men. Our great 
contemporaries I have never seen ; never, to my knowledge, 
have I been in the presence of any of our great men, whether 
of action or of thought — great commanders, or great writers, 
discoverers of new lands, or discoverers of new truths ; but from 
no one have they more constantly received that homage which is 
due from every thinking man, to every noble service rendered 
to humanity. ? I can truly say that I have never put down a 
book which has taught me anything worth learning, without a 



THE STUDENT. 85 

silent thanh to the author of it. There are living men to whom 
I owe a great debt. Not those only who make specific con- 
tributions to our fund of knowledge are our teachers. Some 
rather inspire than teach. What should I have done those three 
months that I once passed so disconsolately in Wales, if at the 
bottom of my portmanteau I had not found the Sartor Resartus ? 



CHAPTER III. 



THE MIRAGE. 



There ever i-ises up before us some -perfect whole of society, 
which, when we approach to inspect it closely, vanishes away 
into thin air. Is this a prophecy of what will exist in some 
form we cannot accurately conceive ? or is it a delusion — a 
dream always in the fevered spirit — a mirage always in the 
desert ? 

From very early youth I was perplexed by speculations, of 
an unsettled character, upon that Future Society which mankind 
is one day to construct upon the earth. Like the mirage of the 
desert, some happiest vision of that better Society would be ever 
rising before me, and ever vanishing as I approached to examine 
it. What was it to me ; this far-off future — this destiny of 
mankind in distant centuries, which I could not so much as pro- 
mote by any act of mine ? Nothing. It was nothing more than 
a curious speculation, which might as well concern any planet in 
the universe, as this earth on which I cast my shadow for a time. 
The fate of the inhabitants of Jupiter, and the fate of the inhabit- 
ants of Tellus, when Tellus shall be peopled by an altered and 
a wiser race, are problems very much of the same character. 
Yet this speculation has haunted me throughout a large portion 
of my life ; it has pursued me into every scene ; it has been to 
me a great hope, or a great despondency. It was nothing — it 
was all. 

I could never walk through the crowded streets of a great 
town, and scan the anxious faces that passed me by, — the 
squalor, the wretchedness, the care that meet one at every turn, 
— without asking myself whether it must be always thus — always 
this eternal scramble for the means to live — always this fear, and 



THE MIRAGE. 87 

bitterness, and discontent ? Surely something better than this 
must be practicable — 'must one day be practised — or man has in 
vain been made a reasonable being. I could never pass under 
the gloomy walls of a jail — the gloomiest and harshest sort of 
fortress society has ever built for its own protection — I could 
never walk under those walls, and call to mind the futile schemes 
that good men devise for the reformation of criminals, by new 
methods of punishment ! — without asking myself whether that 
" Poverty in the presence of Wealth," which is the perennial 
source of crime, is to continue for ever ? I could never enter 
an open church, and hear its mournful litanies, the incessant cry 
for mercy ! — mercy upon miserable sinners ! — without meditating 
whether such will always be — what doubtless it is now — the 
fittest and sincerest cry that man can raise to the God who made 
him ? On days of festival, or of public pageant, I have always 
turned from the spectacle to the spectators. To me no spectacle 
was like the populace that were looking on ; and sad as the 
cares of a great city are, its rejoicings have seemed to me still 
more sad and miserable. Brute noise, and idiot laughter — the 
grimace, and the malice, of an ape — these meet you on every 
side. If such their happiness, what have I to do with promoting 
it ? They are satyrs, not men. 

When I have escaped altogether from cities, and have been 
rambling in a picturesque and beautiful country, thoughts of the 
same kind have still pursued me. The living man is thrown out 
upon the fields to cultivate them, — but what of his own culture ? 
That which should be the most healthy and invigorating, as it is 
the most essential of all labours, is made to bow the neck and 
stultify the mind, and shut out the man from whatever civiliza- 
tion has been hitherto attained. In vain did the roses cluster 
round some lowly cottage. Inside that cottage, or one like it, I 
had looked, I had entered. I had seen the hovel from within, 
and the roses had lost their charm. Fragrance and beauty were 
dallying with the careless winds ; but the lot of the human inhab- 
itant within was foul air, foul food, foul thoughts. 



Forgetful of lake and mountain, — my eyes fixed perhaps on 



88 BOOK II.—CHAPTER III. 

the topmost bar of some roadside gate which I had intended to 
open, — or pausing stock-still before some hedgerow in the solitary- 
lane, apparently intent upon the buds of the hawthorn, as if I 
were penetrating into the very secrets of vegetable life, — I have 
stood for hours musing on the intricate problems which our social 
condition presents to us. There I have reviewed all that our best 
writers on political economy had taught me of the actual organi- 
zation of society, (it fully deserves the name,) and of that system 
which has been wrought out by the free and self-reliant labours 
of all classes of the community. It is a system which has a cer- 
tain completeness of its own ; and very palpable mischief would 
ensue, if this organization were prematurely tampered with, or 
you were to insist upon patching and reforming it upon princi- 
ples directly repugnant to those on which it is grounded. 

I saw plainly that if, moved by some natural sense of justice, 
you should interfere, by legislative means, to raise the wages of 
the labourer, the simple result must be, that the fund destined for 
the payment of wages would be divided amongst fewer labourers 
you would have starved some to feed others better. If, desirous 
of introducing some greater equality amongst those who share in 
the realized wealth of the community, you were to enact some 
new law of inheritance (forbidding the acquisition, by descent or 
bequest, of more than a certain sum), you would simply impov- 
erish your country, all other parts of the system remaining the 
same, by restricting the accumulation of capital. If, urged by 
benevolence, you would extend charity to all who needed it, — if 
you gave to the wants of one man a claim on the superfluities of 
another, — if mere poverty should have its rights, — you would 
bring speedy ruin on the whole society. It is a hard doctrine — 
this of self-reliance — when taught to the lowest and the weakest ; 
it is a hard struggle that the poor have to maintain ; yet if the 
struggle is not kept up there, where precisely it is hardest, the 
whole machinery gives way, goes wrong, or scarce will go at all. 
The only ground on which any systematic charity can be justified 
is this, — that there is an improvidence of despair worse than that 
improvidence which your benevolence will foster ; for let poverty 
settle down in the very lowest condition on which life can be 
supported, mere despondency seizes upon the man, all effort be- 



THE MIRAGE. 89 

comes impossible, and all prudence, whether in regard to a man's 
own interest, or the interest of his offspring, is out of the ques- 
tion ; the creature lives and propagates with brutal apathy. 

Our system has a completeness of its own. Each one for him- 
self, and a law that keeps the peace. A great game of getting 
and of keeping is played out under certain broad rules, to which 
all must conform. Play fair and win, play fair and lose ; the 
winning and the losing are your own concern ; only play fair, — 
that is all that society is concerned with. The system has its 
excitement, at all events ; though the game goes hard against 
some of the players, and there is from time to time a dreadful 
outcry against the rules of the game. Some start with so poor a 
chance. 

The system, however, is not one that is to be lightly meddled 
with. But I would say, communing with myself, — Cannot I see, 
lying out there, on the golden shores of futurity, a quite different 
system, — one which shall consecrate the principle of labouring for 
the good of some whole, of Avhich we constitute a part, — a quite 
different organization, based on an intelligent and equitable co- 
operation ? " Aide-toi, le del t'aidera" is thought a good maxim. 
If instead of "Help yourself," we read " Help yourselves V^ would 
it not be a better formula? and would not all good influences^ 
and the whole scheme of nature, be as likely to conspire with us ? 

I cannot trace step by step the transition from one system to 
the other. I suppose it will be slow and gradual, and aided by 
circumstances I cannot foresee. But I do not acknowledge that 
human nature itself, the permanent passions and motives of man- 
kind, present an insuperable obstacle to the realization of the new 
and happier system. I can imagine that a principle of partner- 
ship between labour and capital might take the place of our pres- 
ent practice of payment in wages ; and that such a partnership, 
first instituted in cities and in great factories, might extend into 
the country, and embrace agricultural workmen. The whole soci- 
ety might become one federal union of many guilds and partner- 
ships. Every one would be gathered into some fold or other ; no 
man would be compelled " to take care of himself" by means most 
pernicious to the community. Our temptations to crime would 
almost be extinguished ; and this quite novel happiness would be 



90 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

introduced into the world — of living in it without fear of each 
other. 

A revolution — brought about gradually, and accompanied with 
many changes in the culture and habits of all classes, — a revolu- 
tion in the tenure of property in land — would signalize the estab- 
lishment of the new system. Land held as the sole property of 
him who cultivates it, gives us the peasant proprietor, — a man 
who may feed himself and his children well, but who knows noth- 
ing of arts, science, literature. Land held in large estates by pro- 
prietors who do not labour, and cultivated by labourers who own 
nothing in the soil, gives us a refined and cultivated class, but a 
class very limited in numbers. Under this system civilization 
has hitherto almost confined itself to great cities. If land were 
again held as the property of those who cultivated it, but held as 
the common property of men who had taken the civilization of the 
towns with them into the country, would there not follow a third 
phase of society vastly superior to either of the preceding ? 

The two conditions which alone seemed to me imperatively 
necessary for this transition to a happier scheme of things were — 
1. Some further advancement in science and the various arts 
that administer to our well-being, so that the productive powers 
of industry will be increased, and the requisite abundance of all 
things may be procurable ; and, 2. Some approximation to intel- 
lectual equality, (by the extension to the many of the knowledge 
and tastes developed amongst the few,) so that a cooperation for 
common purposes would be rendered possible, and the utmost re- 
sult for the good of all extracted from the knowledge and skill 
which is and shall be attained. 



I would not admit — as I stood there studying my problem be- 
fore the hawthorn bush — that there was in the nature of things 
any absurdity in the supposed union of a certain degree of refine- 
ment and intelligence with manual labour. It is true, I confessed, 
that men have hitherto chiefly educated themselves in order to 
obtain subsistence, or wealth, or honour, by some learned profes- 
sion ; and this stimulant must evidently be limited to a few. 
But there is a tendency for employments requiring education to 



THE MIRAGE. 91 

increase. And it is also true that knowledge is a pleasure in 
itself, and brings with it the respect and esteem of others ; that 
the taste for books, like that for music, grows by the very grati- 
fication of it ; that science, literature, and the fine arts, tend to 
take their place as ends or pleasures sought for by all classes of 
the community. What is there absurd in the notion that every 
man, though he follow the plough or wield the trowel, may seek 
his share in pleasures and honours of this kind ? Many a wor- 
thy gentleman delights in his spade, in fair digging in his garden ; 
many in the use of the lathe, and the whole box of carpenters' 
tools. Suppose they dug or hammered with a more earnest pur- 
pose, must they cease to be gentlemen in temper and disposition, 
and drop all cultivated tastes and all intelligent discourse ? Why 
might not the labours of agriculture be performed by youths 
quite as refined and well informed as those who now sit at desks 
in innumerable offices and counting-houses ? I have a strong 
suspicion that if some of those youths left their desks for the 
fields, both they and society would be the better for the change. 

" Methinks," I said to myself, " that the future Burns will not 
be taken from the plough, and made an exciseman of, the better 
to fit his external condition to the poetic character. I see him 
in his native fields, but with more genial companions, and a 
labour more rationally participated. I see him musing under the 
shadow or the shelter of the tree, then, starting from his pleasant 
lair, fold up his tablets, or throw them with a smile to his friend, 
whilst he steps forward to take his place in the furrow." 

" Well, your meditative blacksmith," I said, started in the 
midst of these thoughts by his ringing hammer heard in the dis- 
tance. " I do not flinch from the idea of a blacksmith medita- 
tive. Would that I had an arm strong enough to wield that 
hammer ! I would make the anvil ring again. I would forge 
you most excellent horseshoes and ploughshares ; and at set of 
sun would read grave lectures, to whomsoever would listen, on 
philosophy and all the sciences. My manuscript would display 
a broader style of penmanship : the matter would be none the 
less strong and. healthy. Why, any man with animal vigour, 
with some spring of elasticity in his frame, would dig, and delve, 
and hew, and hammer, and mount scaffolding, or dive into mines 



92 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

and bring out coal and iron — if he had but friendly and equal 
companions about him, and felt that he was doing a rational ser- 
vice amongst rational and serviceable men. In no necessary toil 
can there be any degradation. It is the gross companionship, or 
gross habits associated with it, that alone renders it degrading. 
It is only the moral dirt that sticks. We make a great bugbear 
of labour. What is it, after all, but muscular effort, which, if 
you will be temperate in it, is an indisputable pleasure. Young 
men at Oxford will labour at the oar enough to earn their daily 
bread three times over. And if it were not for the associates it 
would condemn them to, how many would prefer a strenuous 
labour in the open air to the sedentary occupations marked out 
for them — labours, perhaps, of a lawyer's chamber, which will 
confine the limbs, and fret the nerves, and wear out the brain, 
and add nothino; to their intellectual culture. 



Thus I reasoned with myself, standing at the hawthorn bush ; 
and having arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, I turned 
about, and marched on full of faith and hope. As I marched 
triumphantly along, I came to a field where men were ploughing. 
I had often watched the ploughman as he steps on steadily, hold- 
ing the share down in its place in the soil, and felt curious to try 
the experiment myself. This time, as the countryman who ap- 
proached me had a good-natured aspect, I asked him to let me 
take his place between the stilts. He did so. I did not give 
him quite the occasion for merriment which I saw he anticipated ; 
I held down the share, and kept it in its due position. But I had 
no conception of the effort it required — which, at least, it cost me. 
Wlien I resigned my place, my arms trembled, my hands burned, 
my brain throbbed ; the whole frame was shaken. And some- 
thing, too, was shaken in the framework of my speculations. 
The feasibility of uniting with labours such as these much of the 
culture we call intellectual, was not so clear to me as it was an 
hour ago. I walked along less triumphantly, maintaining a sort 
of prudent silence with myself. 



THE MIRAGE. 93 

I smile as I recall to mind how often, at this period, some in- 
cident, or trait of character, or scene of real life, would determine 
the current of my speculations, and revive, or dismiss, my future 
Utopia. 

I am passing along a high-road. It is in the north of Eng- 
land, amongst some of the most beautiful scenery we possess. A 
stone wall skirts the road, just high enough, as is so often the 
case, to conceal all the prospect from the pedestrian. Whether 
it is necessary to build so high to keep cattle in, or out, I will 
not pretend to determine. The probability is, that the idea has 
never once occurred to our farmers or graziers that the sight of 
the country can be pleasant to any eye but his who owns the 
crop or the pasture. Happily, a barred gate affords me at 
length a view of the landscape. It is very beautiful. A little 
lake, with its charming islets receives the reflection of the moun- 
tains around, and of the glories of a summer's sky. I pause, 
leaning on the gate. 

Within that wall, pacing the soft turf by the margin of the 
lake, or standing in mute contemplation of the scene, was a gen- 
tle lady, who, from the studied simplicity of her dress, evidently 
belonged to the Society of Friends. She was absorbed in the 
beauty around her. One felt that her spiiit reflected all the 
peace and serenity of the scene. Placid, contemplative, pious, I 
could almost read her thoughts. " Will heaven be very unlike 
this ? " I hear her murmur to herself. " Can it be very much 
more beautiful ? Can I, should I, hope for a scene more lovely 
to meet the angels in ? " Such, I felt persuaded, must have 
been the tenor of her meditations. 

Without that wall, on the hard high-road, came by, at the same 
time, a cart drawn by a miserable horse. It came slowly enough, 
yet clattered noisily along, as the wide shafts swayed to and fro 
against the sides of the starved beast that drew it. Beside the 
cart walked a ragged woman. With one hand she held on by 
the shaft, that she might be partly dragged along ; the other, and 
disengaged hand, brandished a stick which descended in repeated 
blows on the wretched animal. Each blow was accompanied by 
foul and odious curses, which, though addressed to the unoffend- 
ing brute, I interpreted as merely the ungovernable outbreaks of 



94 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

her own tormented and miserable spirit. Peace, beauty, good- 
ness, were things unknown to her — words for which she had no 
meaning. 

And this, too, was woman ! The same clay of humanity had 
been moulded thus, and thus ! Both women, both walking 
through the same scene, at the same hour. The one needed but 
the companionship of the pure and holy to feel that she was 
already in heaven ; the other — if such a thing will bear the 
naming — was walking through this paradise very like a soul in 
hell. 

Then, again, I asked myself, must it be thus always ? This 
creature of rags, and pain, and curses, has become what she is 
by no natural eccentricity of character. Why could not both 
have been gentle, refined, pious, cultivated ? 



For several days after this I went about refashioning my 
Utopian community. I distributed and simplified the necessary 
labours of the society. Above all, as the central hght and 
power of the whole, I constructed my ideal university or college 
— central seat of learning, science, and the fine arts, which would 
be, as it were, the very heart through which the whole life-blood 
of the community would circulate. 

The monastic institution presents us with a foreshadowing or 
type of the future society — with this slight deficiency, that there 
is no place in it for the wife and family. I was occupied in sup- 
plying this defect in the type. Sallying forth one fine morning, 
full of schemes and arrangements for this purpose, I passed a 
farmhouse. The cries and exclamations of a group of young 
childi*en drew my attention to it. At the door stood a chaise- 
cart, such as serves in the country both for business and pleasure. 
About and around it was a swarm of children, sturdy, rose-cheeked, 
full of health and irrepressible glee, some scrambling up the w^ieels, 
some caressing the sleek horse, who seemed pleased with the pat- 
ting of their little hands. Forth comes my farmer, self-confident 
and rubicund, good-natured, yet with an air, too, of importance in 
his round manly face. He tosses some half-dozen of these merry 
urchins into the cart, which indeed seems of unlimited capacity; 



THE miragp:, 95 

the youngest is left behind to be consoled by the mother, who 
now makes her appearance on the threshold — a comely, smihng, 
busy matron. Away my farmer drives. Never was such a cart- 
ful of happiness and merriment. I hear the laughter of the chil- 
dren ringing half-way down the lane. Oh here, if anywhere, is 
Utopia ! This is the true and eternal type, I exclaimed, of hu- 
man life. No schemer, from Plato downwards, can improve on 
this. I gave my ideals to the winds. This simple reality was 
worth them all. What ! impound this man in any of your pha- 
lansteries — your moral parallelograms — your well-dieted peni- 
tentiaries — leave him nothing he can call his own — nothing to 
toss into the lap of these children and their mother — nothing to 
control, to order, to give — nothing to play the father with — that 
cart and horse not his ! Oh Heaven ! transportation to the North 
Pole were better. 

Just in proportion as one is " cared for " by society, must one 
submit to be governed by it. The home must be looked into by 
the public eye ; it becomes a public institution. Who shall 
guarantee to me, that, in framing the community, you will not 
desecrate the family ? I, for one, will not try " my 'prentice 
hand " on such a matter. 



Often have I, when looking up into the sky, seen a brillant 
white cloud extend itself across the blue ether in the exact model 
of an angel's wing — one wing, never the angel complete. Such 
have been my visions of the Future Society. Both wings would 
never come fairly out ; no complete angel would ever manifest 
itself. 

Some months after this, behold me plodding my solitary way, 
" melancholy, slow," through the streets of the city of Manches- 
ter. I had paused midway here on my route to London, to satisfy 
a curiosity I felt to see those factories which I so often heard 
talked of. To come from the fresh mountain air to such a place, 
is not a mode of approach the most conciliating. Here men live 
buried in bricks — buried above ground in a sort of open cata- 
comb : the dwellings of the workmen deserve no better name. I 



96 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

passed through interminable rows of brick hovels, foul and noisy, 
in which I am sure I should have sighed for the peace of the 
catacomb. Not the leaf of a tree visible ; no sky, only smoke ; 
no running water but what runs with filth. Men have built thus 
for their habitation ! — a race of breathing, seeing, reasoning, crea- 
tures, have built thus on their beautiful planet Tellus! For 
leave to live in habitations like these, where air and light, beauty 
and fragrance, are shut out for ever — where one foul cell looks 
only into its neighbour — men and women are toiling as no other 
animal on the face of the earth toils. 

Not much to jeopardize here, I said to myself, of domestic joy, 
of spontaneous activity, of the sacred privacy of home. The 
official eye might enter here without great detriment to the insti- 
tution of the " family." Personal liberty, or freedom of move- 
ment, short of being incarcerated, seems here at its minimum. 
Not much to sacrifice of self-government and free enterprize. 
One might submit here to be " cared for " a little more, at the 
risk of being governed a little more. 

I had been anxious to see our great factories ; but being a 
stranger in the place, and having brought with me no letters of 
introduction, I had great difficulty in doing so. Into the most 
eminent of them I failed to obtain admittance. Those which I 
did not see, I can quite understand, were better arranged than 
those I was permitted to enter. What I saw, however, were fac- 
tories, full of veritable men and women, and vast numbers of 
them. I entered an enormous brick building, rising story above 
story, every floor packed as full as it could hold with its living 
machinery. As I ascended this huge pile the air grew closer 
and more offensive at every stage, till I was fain to content my- 
self with looking from the doorway down the long crowded room, 
dim from its thick atmosphere, and stunning you with noise from 
the whirr of wheels and the clattering of the looms. In this 
stifling atmosphere, and amidst this incessant din, pale and 
spiritless men and women were moving about, performing their 
monotonous and subsidiary services to the steam-engine. They 
themselves were at once as restless and automatic as those clat- 
tering looms they attended on. It was some consolation to think 
that habit might render them almost as insensible as the iron 
machinery about them. 



THE MIRAGE. 97 

Is this the last phase, I said to myself, of our even-handed, 
self-reliant scheme ? Men and women spend ten hours and 
a half every day — Parliamentary measurement, as I am told — 
in this sort of service. What is it /or? what great object? what 
urgent need ? what new and pressing emergency has fallen on - 
mankind ? None ; it is the work of every day and all life long, 
and it is for the oldest need man has — the need of some sort of 
body-clothing. When was it known before that this matter of 
clothing cost all this toil ? Is this your progress ? Make gar- 
ments out of cotton, and teach the steam-engine to help in the 
manufacture — but, men and women ! bethink you into what you 
are manufacturing yourselves. 

After visiting several factories and workshops of different de- 
scriptions, I found myself pacing to and fro upon one of the 
bridges. I shall not easily forget the view from Blackfriars 
Bridge, Manchester. The river runs beneath you black as ink. 
Fresh streams of filth are pouring into it from the factories that 
line the banks, or a jet of steam escapes in puffs, the white steam 
looking conspicuous and ghastly enough, contrasted against the 
black river. From square ungainly buildings (such palaces has 
Industry built for herself) tall chimneys arise, throwing volumes 
of smoke into the air. Through the intervals of these enormous 
chimneys, and quite overpowered by them, the steeples and 
towers of the distant churches struggle into sight ; forming, in an 
architectural point of view, and perhaps in some other points of 
view, a very incongruous arrangement. The people who pass 
and repass before you, fully correspond with the scene — dreary- 
looking men, and slatternly girls with ragged shawls hanging 
loose upon their shoulders — nothing feminine about them but 
their dress. Men and women, boys and girls, walk past you with 
the same hard, callous, indifferent, unhopeful demeanour. 

As I stood lingering upon this " Bridge of Sighs," my atten- 
tion was caught by a printed placard, inviting " the Religious 
and Philanthropic Public" of Manchester to an anti-slavery 
meeting. The object of the meeting seemed to me — in the 
humour I was then in — singular enough. The rehgious and 
philanthropic gentry of Manchester, the owners of these facto- 
ries, their wives and widows, sons and daughters — all living 



98 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

upon cotton — were to meet and energetically to protest, as with 
one voice, against the cultivation of cotton by slave labour. 
Protest by all means, if simple protestation can effect any thing ; 
but is the raw cotton the only article of commerce that goes 
forth into the markets of the world with some moral taint cling- 
ing to it ? If the South Carolinian stood with me upon this 
" Bridge of Sighs," he might think that it was also in the weav- 
ing that the cotton goods got a certain infection from misery and 
injustice. 

But there is no Arcadia for us — none at least to be reached 
by going bach We must push forward. We cannot simplify 
society ; we must master its complexities. Cotton-growing and 
cotton-spinning will both be one day conducted in a better 
fashion. The slave will rise to the position of the paid labourer, 
and the paid labourer may be rising to a quite new position. 
We must push forward — forward through the din and smoke of 
this very Manchester. Here, at all events, men are learning to 
combine, and different classes are also learning to combine for 
mutual assistance. Amidst all the heat and toil and tribulation 
of this scene, a welding process is being carried on, that may 
have many good results. From all I understand, there is no 
town in England which manifests so enlightened a public spirit 
as this of Manchester. There is no going back. We must 
transform this Manchester itself, bit by bit, stone by stone, man 
by man, into a pleasant city, and a city of the just. Science 
must teach us to consume this smoke ; these dwelling-houses 
must be made healthful and cheerful. Improved processes of 
manufacturing shall disconnect our industry from the filth which 
poisons the river, as well as that which infects the air. Our 
"manufacturing era" is an age of apprenticeship. I always 
return to this indisputable truth ; It is by doing our best under 
the existing state of things that we shall work out a better. It 
is by improving our own present system, that we create the 
nobler system that is to follow. 



I am in London. Have others felt the same contrarieties as 
I have done ? If, at one time, the aspect of a great city has 



THE MIRAGE. 99 

excited glorious anticipations of the future, from reflection on 
the sciences and arts that are cultivated therein, at other times 
it has called up terrible apprehensions ; and I have feh nothing 
but alarm, lest whatever of civilization has been already accom"^ 
plished should be swept awaj in some mad and desperate revo- 
lution. 

Look down that long street,--every house on both sides of it 
is a spacious mansion, replete with all desirable comforts— the 
abode of wealth and refinement, of active intelligent men, of 
beautiful and cultivated women. And look again at those groups 
of haggard mortals, with envy, hatred, and malice at their hearts ; 
they stand or they saunter under those windows, behind which 
sit unseen your gentle and your wise. That thin glass alone 
interposes. What if this haggard multitude should in its frenzy 
resolve to enter— where it can enter only to destroy ? For me, 
I sometimes draw my breath in fear and trembling, as if in an 
agony of suspense, when I think what brute Power might do, if 
stung into anger and desperation. " Come out— come down to 
us ! " What if an insensate crowd should cry out thus ? " We 
cannot rise to you — come down to us ! " 

If any pensive gentleman, in quest of a " new sensation "— 
whom not even the last novel will appease— should apply to me, 
I think I could help him to a suggestion. Let him throw over 
his shoulders an old cloak, and put some weather-beaten cap 
upon his head, and seat himself, as I once did, amidst the rabble 
and the riff-raff of one of the crowded streets of London. There 
level with the pavement, let him contemplate society from this 
new point of view. Looking up from this lowly position, the 
old familiar structure, if I mistake not, will wear a singularly 
novel aspect to him. He will also find himself surrounded (not, 
thank Heaven ! with the men who form the foundation of society' 
but) with an obscene race, that burrow into the foundations deep 
and mischievously enough. 

I once quite undesignedly found myself in such a position. I 
had returned to London from a long sojourn in the country, and 
had lost much of that awe and respect for conventional proprie- 
ties which distinguishes every reputable citizen. In the fields 
where I had been in the habit of walking, some old horse, pro- 



100 BOOK IL— CHAPTER III. 

jecting its head over the gate, was the severest critic of my cos- 
tume and demeanour I was likely to meet. If I was tired, I 
sat down on the first convenient resting-place. This liberty — 
unheard-of in the respectable citizen — I took even in the streets 
of London. Being wearied, I sat down on the steps of a church. 
I sat down under the portico of a church in Regent Street ; a 
place which, at that time, was a good deal infested by loiterers 
of all descriptions. I found myself amongst beggars, itinerant 
vendors of knives and slippers, women with large pieces of wash- 
leather displayed for sale, Italian boys with their images and the 
like. It was November ; I had on a travelling cloak and cap ; 
I was probably taken for a foreigner. With our populace a 
foreigner is either a prince or a beggar ; it was plain I was not 
the prince ; no one took any heed of me. 

Out there in the street before me rolled by carriage after car- 
riage — elegant equipages, as they are called. How very pal- 
pable it became to me, as I now sat here on the pavement, that 
those who looked out of carriage windows regarded us as a quite 
different race of beings, as quite out of the pale of humanity. 
Evidently the dogs in the street, the lamp-posts on either side of 
the way, or the heaps of mud scraped up for the scavenger's 
cart, were just as likely to occupy their thoughts as the human 
group to which I then belonged. The lady and gentleman who 
walked past us, with stately or with careless step, were equally 
indifferent. Unconscious they of our presence, unless as obsta- 
cles in the path, to be especially avoided. We were at their 
feet, but far beyond their vision ! Soh ! — thought I — this it is to 
sit on the lowest round of the ladder. It is well to try the place. 
How very near the dirt we are ! What if this were verily my 
position in society ? I imagined for the moment that it was, and 
identified myself with these children of the streets. 

I learnt something from my new position, and the novel society 
around me. I felt that the passionless neglect of our superiors 
was returned by us with something far more energetic. You 
simply pass us by ; you have no hostility, nor dream of exciting 
it ; you think no harm, you would not hurt us — no, nor would 
■ you hurt the crawling toad upon your path ; you avoid us both, 
and for the very same reason — the contact would be disagree- 



THE MIEAGE. 101 

able. Simply you do not love us — this is the extent of your 
feeling ; but ours ? I detected that we return neglect — with 
hate! 

I heard the beggars whine out their pious supplications, as in 
times past they had often done to myself, but from my new posi- 
tion I heard the aside also of these miserable actors. I heard the 
brutal curse that followed on the pious supplication when it had 
not succeeded, and the triumphant jest, somewhat more carefully 
expressed, when the disgusting hypocrisy had prospered. How 
the eye spoke of plunder, as it caught the glitter of any ornament 
on the passers-by ! how of sullen hate, as it followed the bold and 
confident step of the English gentleman ! 

One thing I noticed (and I have noticed it on other occasions), 
which at first appears very inexplicable. Criticism on dress or 
equipage one expects in the windows of a club-room. But to find 
it here ! — amongst these ! — and of the most intolerant description ! 
Any singularity of costume is punished, amongst us of the streets, 
with the most unsparing ridicule. Many of us, who never rode 
at all except in a dung-cart, greet a sorry equipage with jeers of 
derision. How is this ? Is our taste so very refined, or have we 
really so keen a sense of the ridiculous ? I apprehend that it is 
nothing more than an overflowing of the bile, — a demonstration 
of our spite. Any excuse for a brutal jest is greedily seized 
upon. Our most absurd laughter is in fact a poor species of re- 
taliation. 

A coarse fellow stands near me. A gentleman and his dog 
passes. The dog thinks proper to assail the man, — does not bite, 
but barks, as if he was very much disposed to do so. The gen- 
tleman calls off his dog, — chides and reproves the animal, — but, 
as the manner of the English gentleman is, he does not cast a 
look, a glance, apologetic or otherwise, upon the man ! All passes 
as a breach of discipline on the part of the dog. But the man 
followed, — not the dog, but his master, — followed with a scowl 
that made my blood run cold. " Our turn may come one day," 
he muttered between his teeth, " and then ! " — some horrible im- 
precation was lost in the jostle and turmoil of the street. 

Without a question, we of the pavement, if we had our will, 
would stop those smooth-rolling chariots, with their liveried attend- 



102 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

ants (how we hate those clean and well-fed lackeys !) — would 
open the carriage door, and bid the riders come down to us ! — 
come down to share — good Heaven, what ? — our ruffianage, our 
garbage, the general scramble, the general filth. 

" War to the knife rather ! " they of the chariots would exclaim, 
— " War to the death rather than this ! " — and with good reason. 
Meanwhile they ride there softly, thinking no evil, — thinking 
very little of any thing at all. 

The fashionable crowd thickens ; there are more carriages, 
more pedestrians, more gazers at the shops and at each other ; 
and throughout all this stir and glitter, mark that slow-creeping 
scarecrow of a man, creeping along in the gutter, with his mouth 
glued to his harsh and screaming clarionet. He is worth observ- 
ing. That he should be there torturing all ears, speaks not much 
for city life in the nineteenth century ; but that he himself should 
most contentedly live by the exercise of this unlimited power of 
torturing others, is the point I would notice. I look upon him, as 
he there perambulates the streets, to be a sort of incarnation, or 
living symbol, of our commercial spirit. On he creeps, screech- 
ing eternally ; nothing to him the curses and the jeers of men ; 
he has to live. Whether he extorts his pence from charity, or 
from afflicted mortals who bribe him to quicken his tread, he cares 
not ; cares nothing for the motive, cares only for the pence. "Buy 
my music — my intolerable screeching ! It maddens you ; that is 
your affair, not mine. Buy ! Buy ! " It does madden you. You 
fling curses at his head, but you fling pence too. You buy it that 
way. He wants nothing else but such curses and sufficiency of 
pence. 



I sat on the steps of the church for some time unnoticed, and 
undisturbed by high or low ; but now a shabbily dressed man took 
his seat beside me, and without needless preface, or the formali- 
ties of introduction, began to talk out the thoughts that were in 
him. Something, I suppose, in the manner in which I was sur- 
veying the scene led him to conclude that he should find in me a 
ready listener. He was no bad representative of the spirit of dis- 
content which resides down here upon the pavement. 



THE MIRAGE. 103 

The man spoke well and energetically, and considering his 
theme, not without a tone of moderation. I suspect that, although 
he gave me to understand that he was a printer by trade, he had 
a little practised the neighbour craft of authorship ; possibly had 
contributed many a political tirade to the journal which he helped 
to print. We were then in the year 1842, a period of unusual 
distress, and certain revolutionary opinions were, in consequence, 
making head amongst us. They have since subsided with the 
same severe distress which had brought them forward. His con- 
versation, as I remember, ran thus. My part in it will be 
chietly indicated by some turn in his own expressions. 

" You may well look, sir, at these glittering shops, and all the 
toys and trappings of luxury displayed behind their plate-glass 
windows. Here we are, sitting on the steps of a Christian church, 
and looking at the pomps and vanities which it seems have not 
been renounced. And here and there, hovering about these plate- 
glass windows, you may catch sight of some of the children of tlie 
poor. Clothed in rags, fed on refuse, they will at night be ken- 
nelled like dogs — or worse. Human children are brought up like 
wild beasts ; and these shops are blazing -Avith silly jewellery and 
gaudy stuffs. Yonder is one full of fantastically carved uphol- 
stery. Absurd ! as if sound sleep were to be got out of architec- 
tural bed-posts ! 

" Straight before is a vast magazine stocked with lace embroid- 
ery — I know not what — flimsy things of no use, and little beauty. 
You would say that men had done ail their serious work before 
they sat down to the manufacture of such things as these ; you 
would imagine that the artisans of such flimsy productions were 
easy well-conditioned men, on whose hands time was hanging 
rather heavily, — that the homestead and the larder had been built 
and filled before men took seriously to making lace ! No such 
thing. The wan and meagre artisan of this fabric^ as they call it 
— which fashion prodigally buys to-day, and may toss aside con- 
temptuously to-morrow, — worked at it for very bread, and hardly 
got the bread he worked for ; ay, and trembled all the while lest 
he should lose his precious employment. He could not use his 
strong right arm in building up the homestead that he wanted, 
and he had no other way to get his food but this. A man's life 



104 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

hangs on siicli a thread ! A living man works all the day with 
his head down, — I know it, — all the time the blessed sun is in the 
heavens, — works at his loom, with famine looking over his shoul- 
ders, to produce this tawdry, flimsy stuff! His hfe hangs upon 
this thread ! — hangs just now on the glib nonsense of yonder 
courtly shopman persuading some silly woman to purchase what 
can be of no earthly use to her. 

" Equality ! why talk to me of equahty ? Who cares for equal- 
ity ? What is it to me that my neighbour lives more sumptuously 
than I, so long as I am dieted sufficiently ? If I have a good 
brick house to fend me from the weather, what is it to me that 
my neighbour covers his with stucco and Corinthian pillars ? 
What are his Corinthian pillars to me ? What care I for his 
architectural bedposts ? The evil lies here : That the labour of 
man is misdirected to the production of superfluities, whilst a 
number are left unsuppiied with the essentials of a humanized 
existence. There is a palpable misdirection of human industry. 
All this elaborate fringe-work and embroidery, and many thou- 
sands starving in their rags. 

" How can I draw the line, you ask, between luxury and essen- 
tials ? What is superfluity to one man, is necessary to another. 
Mere cavil. The old quibble. Of course, I cannot draw the 
line, but the two provinces are nevertheless distinct enough. 
There are certain matters which, experience has by this time 
taught us, pertain to health, to decency, to morals, to the preven- 
tion of absolute suffering. We must all have warmth as well as 
food ; we ought all to breathe fresh air. Pure water should be 
attainable by all. Such implements of furniture as are needful 
to health and repose might be manufactured for all. These are 
not in their nature luxuries, which, I take it, are things a man 
may dispense with unharmed. Draw the line ! Whoever drew 
a line yet ? Nowhere, so far as I have learnt, in science or in 
morals, has a line ever been drawn. No physiologist, as I am 
told, can say where animal life itself begins, or point out the first 
in his order of living creatures that feels 'pain, — which yet is a 
very unmistakable matter where it is felt. Am I to be compelled 
to draw the precise line between utility and luxury before I re- 
monstrate against the injustice which herds a whole family into 



THE MIRAGE. 105 

one miserable garret, and decorates half-a-dozen spacious apart- 
ments for a man who rarely enters one of them ? 

" Yes ! yes ! If all cannot be decently housed, this is no rea- 
son, I admit, why a few should not have both decent and decorous 
habitations. If our society, with all its skill and industry, can 
manage to build and furnish only a certain proportionate number 
of habitable dwellings, let it by all means build and furnish just 
so many as it can. The rest of us must wait, or endure our 
want with patience. But is it so ? I do not forget — I too have 
read my political economy — I do not forget that the materials for 
building, as of all human industry, are the produce of the soil, 
and are not illimitable. But will any one contend that the skill 
and industry of the society has here done its utmost for the ser- 
vice of society ? or that it is the want of building material that 
prevents us from exceeding the present limit to the house- 
accommodation of our populace ? Are there not thousands of 
strong arms that would work at this, if our system permitted 
them to work ? Of clay to make bricks with, and all articles of 
crockery, of iron, and of glass, the supply may be said to be co- 
extensive with the labour men are willing to bestow in obtaining 
it. Timber may fail us ; but I do not find that the supply of 
timber runs short for any building purposes of the rich. When 
it is proposed to pull down the narrow streets and alleys where 
the poor reside — not to build larger houses for them, but to 
make room for more houses for the rich — driving the poor into 
streets and alleys already overcrowded, I never hear it objected 
that the supply of timber is likely to fail." 



I could not but here interpose to explain, as well as I was 
able, that the misdirection of industry of which my oratorical 
companion complained, had a tendency to correct itself, and will 
correct itself, with the gradual progress of all classes of society, 
and especially of the class of operatives. When the more intel- 
ligent workman sjyeiids his wages betf.ei^, and, owing to the same 
increasing intelligence and prudence, has more ivages to speiidy 
the industry and the capital of the country will be in a still 
5* 



106 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

larger proportion devoted to the supply of our substantial com- 
forts. This misdirection of labour will, in fact, vanish as the 
prosperity and intelligence of the whole country advance. He 
heard me with some impatience, and then broke in — 

" Sir, you talk the language of the safe, idle, orthodox pro- 
gressionist. All is to come right by the slow operations of 
causes already in the field. The instructed workman will be- 
come more prudent — prudent especially in the article of mar- 
riage ; his wages then will rise ; he will become a larger 
consumer — the capitalist will accordingly work for Mm in an 
increased proportion. Thus this sad misdirection of human in- 
dustry will be remedied. It is a pleasant faith ; and those who 
do not suffer from the disease may very patiently wait for the 
remedy. But the system itself is at fault. Your prudent oper- 
atives have raised their wages, and now observe what follows. 
Profits fall. If capital is abundant and profits low, which is the 
prosperous condition of things for the operative, forthwith a num- 
ber of rash projects and speculations are set afloat ; any scheme 
that promises a large profit is seized upon ! the capital is wasted 
on such schemes, or it is spent in an unproductive consumption, 
or it is sent abroad to be employed in other countries ; or per- 
haps war breaks forth, and it goes that way. By these means 
the amount of capital is reduced, and wages are reduced ; pru- 
dent or imprudent, the operative must suffer. What is called 
the normal rate of profits is restored. Political economists teach 
us that this is the usual, the scientific order of events. A Chris- 
tian economist, in his Bridgewater Treatise, applauds this nice 
adjustment of the social machinery, by which capital is always 
prevented from being too abundant, and compares it to the be- 
neficent arrangements of the Deity in the natural world. But 
what then becomes of the hope that the labourer will raise him- 
self and his class by his prudence ? What avails his prudence ? 
His wages are again reduced by a reduction of the amount of that 
capital which is to be spent in wages — a reduction brought about 
by a prodigality or cupidity of the capitalist, — which is part of 
the normal state of things. Nay, without laying any blame 
upon the capitalist, is there not in our present system, as it now 
works, an incompatibility between the interests of the capitalist 



THE MIRAGE. 107 

and the workman ? The prosperity of the man of wages is the 
adversity of the man of profits.^' 



I protested against this notion that there was a fatal antago- 
nism between the capitalist and the workman ; I insisted that it 
is not one class only of the community that has to improve, or 
that will improve ; and that, so far from the prodigality and im- 
patient cupidity of the capitahst being a necessary part of our 
social machinery, I felt persuaded that these periodical fits of 
recklessness would cease with the generally advancing intelligence 
of mankind — that the capitalist would learn to be content with 
smaller profits — that he would feel himself in too responsible a 
position lightly to fling away that fund from which the wages of 
the labourer were paid. All society, I siaid, moves on together. If 
the operative becomes more prudent, the capitalist also takes a 
higher vifew of his own duties, and feels himself more responsible.^ 
I did not make much impression upon my companion. " If 
landlords and capitalists," he replied, " are to become wise and 
benevolent, let them adopt some steadfast scheme, some permanent 
arrangement, which shall do away altogether with these terrible 
fluctuations in what is called the labour-market. Because money 
fails one class, thousands of another class are reduced to beggary 
If the harvest has failed, some of us may be compelled to starve. 
My proposition is, that with corn in the granary there ought 
never to be seen' such a spectacle as honest and able men peti- 
tioning in vain for work." 

" You belong, I suspect, to those philanthropic and benevolent 
reformers who would educate the lower classes, but protest, at 
the same time, that their education is not to bring with it any de- 
sire for social or organic change. What care I for this educa- 
tion of the people, unless it does bring with it some organic 
change ? What is education to a man who has no leisure given 
him to read or to think ? Educate as much as you please, but 
do you think to render men more content with an unjust system 
by giving them faculties to see, and sensibilities to feel its injus- 
tice ? Education, unless it modifies directly or indirectly the 
whole condition of the operative, will be no boon. A toad, they 



108 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

say, will live — such life as it is — in a block of stone ; but if you 
drill holes to it, and stir it up with galvanic or other excitement, 
I think, in common mercy, you should cut away something more 
of the stone, and give it freedom. 

" Oh yes ! very philanthropic are our public men — up to a 
certain point. They have lately taken the factory children and 
the factory girls under their especial protection. But these kind 
guardians stop at a very critical point in the interest of their 
ward. A poor factory girl might say to her legislators : ' All my 
life I obey rules — rules of the factory, rules of Parliament — I 
live by rule. I was educated according to some public law ; I 
rise from my bed, I enter and leave the factory, I take my meals 
by strictest regulations ; I work my ten hours and a half statute 
measurement ; every hour of recreation is meted out to me by 
others ; I exercise no will of my own ; I am a creature in the 
hands of others. Well, I obey — I work patiently, punctually ; 
you will surely see that I have always work to do — that I can 
earn these poor wages which represent for me the means of 
life.' 

" ' My poor good girl,' her legislative guardian would reply, 
< that one step further in your behalf, which you plead for with 
such simplicity, would revolutionize the world. Neither for you, 
nor for any of us, is there security for the future. The capitalist 
who employs you may break to-morrow ; the shopkeeper who 
takes the goods of the capitalist may be a bankrupt the day 
after he has purchased them. We are all gamesters ; you too, 
must risk your trifle of wages at the table. We are all gamesters, 
and apparently we like the excitement ; we should do nothing 
without it. To you, my poor girl, the excitement may not come 
in the most agreeable form. But there is no help for it ; you 
must stake — what you have to stake.' 

" But does not every honest-hearted man rise up in revolt 
against a system like this ? I ask you. Can it last ? Say that 
the rich and prosperous fold their arms in perfect apathy and 
content — are there not miserable multitudes who are beginning 
to feel that their misery is not a necessity of nature, but a social 
injustice — at all events, a social blunder ? They take measure 
of the power and the knowledge now realized by man, and they 



THE MIRAGE. 109 

say, Let this power and knowledge be exercised for tlie benefit 
of all. Here is God's land that He has given us, and the 
science that he has tauglit us, and the strength of numbers, and 
the combination of varied intellects — say that the Past was as 
perfect as it could be, there are now powers, aspirations, capabili- 
ties for a better system than the Past could accomplish." 



In the solitude of my own thoughts, I could dream of new 
social forms to be developed in some remote era of the world's 
existence ; but when I heard another speak of them out aloud, 
as schemes to be forthwith advocated and attempted, I recoiled 
with alarm. " But, good God ! " I exclaimed, thrown somewhat 
from my balance, " what is it you would do ? What is it you 
propose ? Do you teach Communism ? Look about you ? 
Communism between These and Those ? Very possible, if you 
could build your fraternal community on mutual fear, hatred, 
distrust — not otherwise. These are the only feelings I find in 
common between the extreme classes of society. Misery that 
is full of anger. Wealth that is full of pride — what Communism 
will you construct out of these ? 

" The Communism," I continued, " of the down-trodden classes 
rising into sudden power (France has shown it to us), has sensu- 
ality for its end, and murder for its means. Some revolutionary 
enthusiast may possibly be dreaming of universal peace, of diffused 
intelligence, of truth and justice, arts, letters, music, and philan- 
thropy, but he will awake from his dreams to find himself in 
the orgies of a brothel, and at his first step his foot will be slip- 
ping in human blood, and he will catch, for all support, the 
fraternal grasp of drunkards and assassins ! Oh, it is madness ! 
madness ! " 

What answer my companion would have made to this ener- 
getic outbreak (which was more due, in fact, to some previous 
cogitations of my own than to any thing he had said), I cannot 
tell ; for at this moment our conversation was suddenly inter- 
rupted by the authoritative voice of the policeman ordering us to 
" move on." My orator started to his feet in indignation at this 
command. I, too, found my latent dignity roused in an instant 



110 BOOK II.— CHAPTER III. 

by the touch of the policeman's hand upon my shoulder. This, 
too, was a " new sensation " — a novel experience, and one that 
brought me very rapidly back to a due sense of conventional 
proprieties. I "moved on," but not without having gained 
something for further reflection as I proceeded on my way. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE MOTH AND THE FLAME. 



It was not always politics that occupied my thoughts, and the 
next time I walked down Regent Street, an incident, of a very 
different kind from that which I have just recorded, excited very 
different emotions. 

An open carriage is drawn up at the door of one of those re- 
positories of fashionable luxuries that I and my chance companion 
had been so severely criticizing. The ladies have apparently lefl 
the carriage for their shopping. One of them, however, remains 
behind. She sits back in a corner of the barouche, her features 
almost concealed by the little fringed parasol which she holds 
down close to her head, and underneath the shade of which she 
seems to be amusing herself by scanning the great crowd of faces 
passing by and eddying around her. I am walking along in my 
usual dreamy mood, but some indefinable sympathy leads me, as 
I pass, to look up. I steal a glance at this fair young muse, 
meditating upon the world from an open barouche. It. is Wini- 
fred. My first impulse is to redouble my pace, and to avoid 
recognition. I walked rapidly up the street. By-and-by I relax 
my speed — I pause — I turn — I walk, first slowly, then rapidly 
back again. I jostle every one I meet. I arrive breathless at 
the spot. I am too late. Her companions had rejoined her ; 
the carriage had driven off. I watch the receding wheels with 
the bitterest disappointment. 



The time now drew near when I was to leave Oxford. To 
please my uncle, I took my degree— went out in the crowd, as it 



112 BOOK II.— CHAPTER IV. 

is said. On finally quitting the university^ it seemed expected 
that I should pay a somewhat longer visit than usual to Sutton 
Manor. 

From time to time I had continued to see Winifred. To me 
she was always the same, — kind, beautiful, irresistibly lovable. 
Only one of us, I suppose, felt or understood what embarrassed 
our intercourse. She wondered why I stayed away so long, and 
why my visits were so brief. Even Lady Moberly seemed to 
think that I over-acted my precautionary part. Sir Thomas had 
at length come to the conclusion that I was altogether an irre- 
claimable book-worm, who would do nothing in the world or in 
society, — nothing either in public or private life ; a result he en- 
tirely attributed to that home education which he had so often 
inveighed against in vain. No one suspected what a complete 
tyranny was exercised over the soul of this wandering book- 
worm. Flight, and the involving myself in some abstruse spec- 
ulation, " to steal from me the natural man," were my only re- 
sources. 

Attracted, — then warned by many a sharp pain ; flying, and 
again attracted ; it was the old story of the Moth and the Flame. 
During the visit I now paid, I gave myself up with a quite holi- 
day delight to the fascination of Winifred's society. At all events, 
I said to myself, the penalty falls on one of us only. And as for 
me — it matters not ; I shall for tliis whole month persist in lov- 
ing ! I shall see her every day, talk with her, walk with her, 
ride with her, be her boatman on this beautiful river. Yes, let 
the storm threaten what it may, I will simply love on. 

I did ! — I had what I have since called my month of Elysium. 
One accomplishment, at least, I had brought with me from Ox- 
ford : I could manage a boat. Winifred still retained her simple 
tastes, and liked, above all things, to be in the open air in the 
country. " Take me out of these thick walls," she would say, 
" into the open sky ; let me have moving clouds about me, — the 
tall trees, their living branches, and the living birds within them ; 
and then, my learned cousin, you may talk to me— your zoologies, 
or biologies, or whatever ology you please. I will be a very pa- 
tient, if not a very intelligent listener." Accordingly, we were 
often on the river together. Now we pulled amongst the rushes, 



THE MOTH AND THE FLAME. 113 

and went in chase of the water-lily, or, grappling to the bank, 
stretched out to gather wild-flowers. Sometimes, putting forth 
all my force, I pulled most triumphantly, boasting of my skill to 
carry her smoothly and swiftly over the stream. At other times 
I would rest upon the dripping oars, and we would watch the sun 
go down ; or Winifred would sing to the swans, as they came 
mantling towards us. Bending over towards the beautiful bird, 
she would sing to it some sweet Italian melody, to try, she said, 
if music could touch this mute beauty of the river. Oh, happy 
trifling ! There was one, at all events, whom the music never 
failed to touch. 



Lover as I had been of nature, I never knew till then what 
beauty there was in the simple landscape, in the fields, the flow- 
ers, trees, and the running stream. I never knew what roses 
were, or could be, till I saw Winifred in her own garden stand- 
ing amongst them. 



I cannot describe her. I cannot see her for the light love 
threw, and still throws around her. Beautiful she was, for every 
one proclaimed it ; and kind she must have been, for everybody 
loved her. Even the old horse in the paddock must trot after 
her. As to the great dog Ne'p^ as we called him, — brief for 
Neptune, — it was a sight to see when he came with huge bounds, 
and his ringing glorious bark, bounding about his young mis- 
tress, not 'touching her, lest he might injure; and when he had 
received his caress, bounding and barking again with most manifest 
triumph and delight. She might well be the most unselfish of 
beings. Everybody was thinking of her. Why should she think 
for herself? To her was reserved the luxury of pleasing all 
others. What joy she gave ! not thinking what she gave ! She 
gave like a child, that laughs and scatters from the lap of secu- 
rity. 

But what mind had she — what intellect ? I cannot tell. I 
had mingled all that was best of my own with it. The thoughts 
I uttered in her presence seemed always half hers ! Perhaps 



114 BOOK IL— gHAPTER IV. 

I had been talking all the time, but I had a vague Impression 
that she had led the conversation ; she had certainly inspired 
it. 

When I talked with Winifred, my philosophy was ever hope- 
ful and full of faith. It was the faith I formed for her that I was 
giving to myself. I saw the heavens opening, for I looked with 
her eyes, and looked — for her. 



I apprehend that the perfect spontaneity of all she said and did 
was particularly charming to me, who had unfortunately acquired 
an mtrospective and analytic habit of thought. Intermittent 
moods of gayety and reflection came and went ; she gave no 
account of them to herself After speaking wittily and well, she 
relapsed the next moment, suddenly and yet gracefully, into the 
contented listener. Effort of any kind she never seemed to make ; 
she had no display, no ambition. Why should she ? Every one 
loved her as she was. It has since occurred to me that the uni- 
versal affection she had, spoilt her for any effort to excel. After 
love, how poor a thing is admiration ! It is only the admiration 
that goes before love, and ushers it in, that is worth having. 



But her own love — her own heart, as we are accustomed to 
say — was this given to no one ? If not to me, to whom else ? 
Of the suitors who came round her, some with her father's un- 
derstood approval, had she selected none ? " Do you mean, 
Winifred," said her mother on one occasion, half jocosely, half 
earnestly, after she had been remonstrating on the very cold recep- 
tion given to some titled guest, — " do yoa mean, Winifred, never 
to love anybody?" "Anybody!" said Winifred, who was then 
sitting at the piano, touching its keys occasionally, " Everybody ! 
You first of all, and everybody else, down to the old horse in the 
paddock. But for this matter of wooing, — to be won and worn, 
— the winning one thing, the wearing another, — I am terribly 
afraid of it. Think, mamma, of being another's ! — as they say. 
I intend to keep possession — unless — unless — " and then, striking 



THE MOTH AND THE FLAME. 115 

the keys, she filled up the pause, and drowned all response in a 
perfect storm of music. 



When I look back upon this golden time — this month of Elys- 
ium, as I have called it — I am amazed to think of the capacity 
for happiness that is in us. Let any philosopher, with his men- 
tal chemistry, try to analyze the complex and intricate felicities 
that the presence of one loved person can bring us ! he will make 
nothing of it. He may as well count the ripples of light upon 
yonder ocean when the rising sun strikes it. 

How fortunate are they with whom the ecstasy of such an 
epoch ushers in the calm and life-long friendship ! With me it 
had to subside — how it could — into mere cold despondency. 
Some of us worship very madly. How, in imagination, do the 
arms open, and we fold so tenderly, for ever and for ever, to our 
hearts — mere shadow ! We open our arms to the empty air. 
Will not the idol come down from its pedestal ? Never ! — never 
to us ! Yet we worship before it still. 

I cannot tell how others in like case have felt ; with me there 
w^as a division and a rebellion in my own soul. My anger turned 
ever upon myself. I can say that I felt no bitterness against any 
other living being. But this mad grief seemed to arm my right 
hand with an imaginary dagger, pointed always against my own 
heart. To such self-combat and suicidal rage was my Elysian 
happiness conducting me ! 



Again the Moth gathered strength and wing enough to take 
flight. I broke from the enchanted garden. I pretended some 
urgent necessity for travelling to Scotland. 

Railway, coach, steamboat — I made no pause till I found my- 
self at the Avell-known inn at Tarbet, on Loch Lomond. I had 
spent one night at the inn, and the next morning I was sitting 
on the margin of the lake. Very majestic is Ben Lomond, very 
beautiful the lake ; but all this inanimate beauty was powerless 
now. I saw it not. Memory was stronger than vision. In 
vain had I travelled some three hundred miles or more ; I was 



116 BOOK II.-CHAPTER IV. 

Still in the garden at Sutton Manor ; I was on the river there, or 
in the park or shrubbery ; I was still with Winifred. And then 
came all manner of delusive reasonings — so prodigally produced 
on these occasions. What if, after all, nothing was wanting, but, 
on my part — courage ! — one bold step ! Would not all yield to 
the wish of Winifred ? was she not omnipotent over the affection 
of both parents ? And how could Winifred express her wish if 
I did not tempt forth the secret of her heart ? And what was 
that which, sitting at the piano, she had drowned in a perfect 
storm of music ? What ought to have followed on that " unless 
— unless ? " 

A thousand such resistless arguments — that seem resistless and 
are light as air — crowded into my mind, till I wrought myself 
into the conviction that I, indeed, was my own greatest enemy, 
by the unbroken silence I had hitherto maintained. I started 
up from the spot where, for some hours, I had been sitting like a 
statue. I flew to the inn, I flew to the steamboat, I travelled 
hack. I travelled without ceasing day and night. I seemed 
only to pause to draw breath, when I stood once more at the 
gate of the shrubbery at Sutton Manor. Then indeed I paused. 
Leaning on the half-opened gate, I saw again my own position 
in its true and natural light. AYas it not always known and un- 
derstood that such a thing was not to be ? One after the other, 
all my follacious reasonings deserted me. What madness could 
have brought me there ? I hoped no one had seen me. Slowly 
and softly the half-opened gate was closed again. I walked 
away, retracing my steps as unobserved as possible through the 
villajre. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WANDERER. 

I RETURNED upon my former track, but this time I stopped 
at the north of England, at our own lakes. My project of a 
tour in Scotland was postponed ; I was indisposed for the con- 
stant movement of the tourist; and even in a familiar scene 
there is some sense of companionship. There was no other help 
for me than to involve myself, as soon as possible, in some fa- 
vourite study, or subject of inquiry. 

In this way there was enough to do. How many noble books, 
written by living contemporaries, were yet to be read and mas- 
tered, if I would prosecute the plan of study I had proposed to 
myself. What Germany has given us of historical criticism, 
what France, England, and every eminent nation has contributed 
to the last theories of science, what our own literature was giving 
us of poetry and philosophy — all this was to be mastered. 

But it was not at once I could settle down to study. And ever 
since, up to the last few months, it has been thus with me — that 
the moment the book was closed, or the train of thinking which it 
had suggested was at an end, there came back the sense of blank- 
ness and of utter desolation. It could not be otherwise. I was 
not framed of that granite strength that can stand alone. And I 
had to stand alone — or so it seemed to me. 



There is a sense of familiarity very agreeable in revisiting 
favourite spots ; but what a contrast is there between nature, 
seen with a free heart to devote to it, and the same nature wan- 
dered amongst with a sad and preoccupied spirit ! Let no one 



118 BOOK IL— CHAPTER V. 

go to the picturesque for consolation. No stricken deer ever felt 
the arrow less for looking up to the mountains. 

It was at Windermere that I first became acquainted with the 
higher order of scenery — first sailed upon the lake, so transpar- 
ent, we wonder it sustains us, and reflecting the mountains, and 
the sky with all its clouds, so clearly in its depths, that we seem 
to be buoyed up between two worlds — or say rather, between 
two heavens. It was here that I first felt the fascination of the 
mountain-range — that mid region, which belongs both to earth 
and sky — cloud architecture, built in the solid rock. Were I to 
travel all round the globe, should I ever forget those dear Lang- 
dale Pikes, and that most graceful range of hills over which 
they preside, or the summits of Fairfield and Skiddaw ? Nothing 
in picture or in poem — nothing that I had seen or read— had 
prepared me for what the summit of a mountain discloses, range 
beyond range, tier above tier, and the last barrier losing itself in 
the sky, and the whole flooded with indescribable variety of the 
richest colouring. And what a thrill of delight it was when, 
from the base of the mountain, I first actually saw the white 
summer-cloud nestling in the hollows above me. There first I 
felt that the heavens were ours too. 

This earliest excursion was made in company with Luxmore. 
We started from Mr. Springfield's together. We must see 
" Wordsworth's mountains," as we called th«m. I remember it 
was spring-time. The young verdure was quite luminous. I 
can think of no fitter word. It was spring-time within as well 
as without. How triumphantly we scaled those hills ! How 
valourously we conquered height after height ! How sturdily 
we strode, when need was, with knapsack on our shoulders, 
through the winding valley ! We sat together on the little 
bridge in Borrowdale, both silent as thought itself, for our spirits 
were attuned in harmony with each other, and we instinctively 
knew when each would crave for silence. 



" Oh, lady fair ! " I remember Luxmore exclaiming, in the 
boundless joy of his free heart, as some gentle equestrian passed 
us — " Oh, lady fair, whom we meet here riding on your palfrey 



THE WANDERER. 119 

— your beauty is harmless here — we defy you here. Very 
studiously grave, very needlessly severe, is the glance you throw 
on the dusty pedestrian, if you condescend to glance at all. For 
worlds you would not be seen to smile, as if you felt the same 
delight as he is feeling. I notice that you will not even look at 
the prospect while he is looking. No matter. The hills and 
the sky have beauty enough for us. No .disdain there. Oh, 
you idle boy, with your one arrow and your puny wing, you are 
nothing here. Hop where you list wdth your one superfluous 
arrow. All earth and heaven are full of love for us. For what 
is this feeling of the beautiful if it is not love — love that the 
smile of nature gives to, and calls forth, from all her children. 
Smile too, fair lady, or vanish from the scene." 

So sung the free spirit of my friend, and I laughingly ap- 
plauded. How changed a mind did I now bring with me to the 
very same scenes ! 

Not all the light on all the hills could now disperse or com- 
pete with the vision of one fair girl. There was not a wild 
flower I could pass which did not speak of her. By some 
chance a moss-rose fell into my hands. What had it to do with 
her ? Yet thoughts and memories gathered round it, thick as 
its own moss, — thoughts of her who had placed the handful of 
roses upon the open book to keep the page from turning. It 
was a charmed thing ; I could look at nothing else. I threw 
the flower away — I walked on — I returned to pick it up 
again ! 

The sound of music from the open window of some pleasant 
residence (I did not now think that such a residence was an 
intrusion upon the scene — as if nature, to be admired, must be 
kept free from any traces of refined human existence) — a few 
notes of a piano heard as I passed, have been sufficient to dis- 
turb my equanimity. I was standing one evening, without being 
aware of it, near the parlour window of some house or villa. It 
was growing dark ; suddenly a lamp was brought into the room 
behind me. It revealed, for an instant, a charming " interior," 
redolent of home. But only for an instant. The heavy folds 
of the crimson curtains were let down, and drawn together. 
They shut in some cheerful happy group. Me they seemed to 



120 BOOK II.-CHAPTER V. 

shut out. How suddenly dark had the road become ! — how dark 
and solitary ! 



See, when the lake is serene, how the whole mountain lies 
reflected in it, from base to summit, and with all its forest. 
Not a leaf is lost. The tree below stands there in that lower 
sky, in as calm an azure as the tree above. But the smallest 
pebble — and any hand may throw one ; but the merest straw or 
withered leaf — and any idle wind may fling them there — shall 
blot out mountain and sky at once. And so it is with that other 
mirror of the mind. Every idle wind that blew was master of 
my peace. In vain was the world so beautiful, if the soul that 
should mirror it was so easily perturbed. 

I climbed to some favourite eminence to see the sun set over 
the mountains. Very glorious is the spectacle, and my heart 
fills with the rapture of the hour. But the light and the rapture 
die down together. Shadow after shadow, each deeper than the 
last, falls upon the world ; and thought after thought, each sad- 
der and darker than its predecessor, steals over the man. How 
desolate is the scene ! How deserted do I feel ! Tears gush 
from my eyes ; I cannot restrain them ; and happily there is 
none to see. With how slow a step do I descend to my solitary 
lodging in the valley ! 

That light-hearted band of tourists, noticed perhaps in the 
morning with a smile at their abundant animal spirits, and their 
talk and tattle of pedestrian feats, would now present themselves 
to my imagination in a very enviable point of view. After their 
holiday and half-boyish pleasures, they would return to old pur- 
suits, old habits, the old home, and constant friends. I had no 
friends, no occupation, no home. I had linked myself to no pro- 
fessional brotherhood ; I had no rivals or allies. Henceforward 
to me there was no return to any spot on earth. All places 
were alike ; in all I must be a wanderer. My home was any 
room where I could draw a bolt across the door. 



THE WANDERER. 121 

Autumn advanced. I have known what it is to sit the day 
long, and see the yellow leaf blown past the windows in the gust 
and the rain. Alone, week after week, I have watched, as my 
friend and poet writes, 

" The autumn down — the sunset of the year." 

Sick or in health, no one ever approached me, ever greeted 
me with a word or a smile. I have lodged for months near the 
houses of humane, charitable, intelligent people. The beggar 
who solicited alms at the gate was rarely turned away. I, who 
wanted only a word, a greeting, a little social speech — I, who 
needed this to save from a misery almost as dreadful as hunger 
to endure — would have solicited in vain. The glance of curi- 
osity, the titter and the whisper, " Who can it be ? " have been 
the nearest approach to human fellowship and sympathy I have 
ever received from English gentleman or gentlewoman. 



But he who has once thought earnestly on the great problems 
of life, will think on to the end of his days ; under cloud or in 
sunshine, doubting or believing, with good result or no result at 
all — he will still think on. I cannot say that my intellectual 
activity was ever entirely suspended. But a despondency, I 
think, crept from my life into my philosophy. I felt the despair 
of discovering truth, where truth, or a belief, was still indispen- 
sable to any peaceful existence. 



The man who has his great task — who is preparing himself 
to be a teacher to mankind — he may well go forth alone. I was 
wandering in the prophet's path, without a prophet's mission. 

I have sometimes looked with shame, and sometimes with 
envy, upon common labourers in the fields, engaged in their 
sturdy toil. When, on a summer's day, I have been standing 
under the shade of the tree, watching the reapers at their work, 
I have said to myself, " This is not fair ! I ought to take my 
part." And then, changing the note, I have added, " This is not 
fair ! I ought to have had my part. Why was I excluded 



122 BOOK II.— CHAPTER V. 

from dl these social, manly, healthful occupations ? Why set to 
this labour of Sisyphus — to roll the barren stone to a summit 
where it will never stay ? " 

Rambling one evening, and pausing as I rambled, through 
one of the quiet valleys of Cumberland, I saw, on turning round, 
an old man sitting near me at his cottage door. Apparently 
he was of that class who, in the north, are called " Statesmen " 
— peasant-proprietors. He was so very old and torpid that I 
could continue standing near him without any sense of intrusion 
on my part. He did not mark me ; he did not even raise his 
eyes to the setting sun, though he was probably enjoying its 
light and warmth to the last. Hard by, under a hedge, there 
lay a broken worn-out plough, long since thrown aside, and, like 
the peasant himself, quite superannuated. There now came a 
sturdy carter with a saw, to cut oflP the handle of the useless 
implement. Apparently he w^anted the piece of wood for some- 
thing doing on the farm. He lays one hand upon the plough, and 
prepares to use the saw with the other. Suddenly the old man 
is roused ; his eye glistens ; he calls out authoritatively, " Leave 
the old plough alone ! " 

I understood directly that he had held and guided it in his 
youth. I noticed that the handle of the plough was still smooth 
from its frequent contact with the human palm. He had leant 
on it, and heard the lark sing the while, as to his dull ear it had 
long ceased to sing. " Leave the old plough alone ! " The 
words kept ringing in my ear as I walked on. I asked myself 
what plough, what instrument, or what product of any kind — 
were I to live to the age of the patriarchs — will remain to 
remind me of the labours of my youth ? 



Idle and unprofitable has been my life — yet harmless withal. 
I have not presumed to be a teacher whilst I was still a learner. 
" How glad I am," I have sometimes exclaimed, " that no book 
of mine, or any printed paper, stands out against me ! There 
may be more virtue in keeping silence than in speaking out, even 
what seems plainest truth. How many men must have appre- 
hended all and more than I have apprehended — known more 



THE WANDERER. 123 

than I have kno^Yn — yet held their peace. They would not 
disturb the simple-minded by what might be a vain effort to 
raise them to a loftier mood. I pass like an arrow through the 
closing air that has touched nothing in its passage, and sinks 
buried in the earth. A feeble pen was the sole instrument I 
could have used, and it drops unused from my hand. I have 
accomplished nothing ; I have disturbed nothing. Stealthily 
and unobserved — as in some great Catholic church — I have 
stepped across the high altar ; none saw if I bent the knee 
or not." 

" Coward ! Coward ! " a bolder man would exclaim, " You 
shrunk from responsibility, if not from toil. You feared to face 
the world ; perhaps had a cowardice still more secret. Can 
truth be uttered, and displease nobody, and displace nothing ? 
And what is that about the hidden talent ? Can all be managed 
by a fold of the napkin ? One consolation may be yours : it is 
a very little talent that its possessor can hide. Oh, twice a 
coward, slight is the gift that goes with the timid soul. The 
world has lost nothing by your silence." 



Besides the north of England, I wandered much over Scot- 
land and Wales — that is, after my own fashion, resting for 
months at a time at one spot, and accompanied always by some 
store of books. 

In Wales I met with Cyril. I had not seen him since he left 
Oxford. Saddest of all interviews. I will not now dwell upon 
it. The incident was of so painful a character that it unsettled 
and disturbed me for some weeks, and finally determined me to 
set forth upon a little tour on the Continent — a design I had 
again and again formed and postponed. Who is there that does 
not think it his duty to see something of Germany, Switzerland, 
Italy ? I started, following the accustomed route. 



I made a strange tourist. I often passed with rapidity through 
towns which generally arrest the curious traveller, and at other 
times lingered long in some outlandish place, which an impatient 



124 BOOK II.-CHAPTER V. 

tourist would think it purgatory to be detained in for a single 
hour. My movements would have been intelligible only to one 
who could have looked within — at the movements going on 
there, in the speculative mind. For, as I went from place to 
place, I still carried the old studies, the old problems with me. 
Some knotty question, psychological or otherwise, had perhaps 
brought me to a stand-still ; it seemed that I was making my 
way through the intricacies of the subject. In fact, the march 
was as much regulated by the success of this campaign that was 
being carried on in the region of thought, as by the attractions of 
my continental route. 

I have come down to my breakfast morning after morning, in 
a comfortless German inn — have come into that long empty pub- 
lic room, where the air seems never fresh, never free from some 
old hereditary smell, compounded of garlic and tobacco, and 
where, at this early hour of the day, the vacant table stands half- 
spread, with its never very clean table-cloth — I have come down, 
morning after morning, to such a place, and seen nothing of its 
destestable aspect ; I have been more contented, more satisfied, 
and lighter at heart than usual ; for light seemed to be breaking 
in upon some part of the mental prospect of the speculative man. 
Had I not at length struck upon the right path ? Did I not hold 
the clew in my hand that would lead me through the wood ? 

I have at length packed up my portmanteau, and departed 
from such an inn, rejoicing at the treasure I carried away with 
me ; invisible treasure that itself happily needed no packing, 
and added nothing to the baggage. I have set forth, congratu- 
lating myself on my sojourn in so auspicious an abode. Perhaps 
before I had travelled many miles, my treasure would prove to 
be "fairy gold" — had turned to mere dross, or old coins of 
worthless metal. I had to fling it out of the window. Then, 
indeed, there could be no mode of progression too rapid for me, 
and I hurried on from stage to stage as if motion itself was the 
end of travel. 

To me there was one advantage of travel particularly valua- 
ble. It threw me, without effort of my own, into a variety of 
companionship. If I did not make advances, I never repelled 



THE WANDERER. 125 

them. I am satisfied that I even obtained, in this wandering 
and unsettled method of life, an insight into the character and 
opinions of men, such as no stationary residence in a town, how- 
ever large my acquaintance in it, would have given me. It 
often happens that, under the excitement of travel, men drop at 
once all disguise in the presence of a perfect stranger.,^1 have 
myself talked half a day from the bottom of my soul to a man I 
had never seen before, and should never see again. We were 
both expansive, and for the same reason. There was nothing 
present to the mind of either but the simple pleasure of uttering 
and communicating our thoughts — a pleasure to which move- 
ment, novelty of scene, animal spirits, had all given additional 
zest. Why should there be any disguise ? This man will not 
even remind me to-morrow of the opinions I am uttering to-day. 
With this man I have no antecedents, binding me to a fictitious 
consistency, and I am giving no pledges which will compel me to 
repeat for ever the feelings or the sentiments of the present hour. 
With him I compromise nothing. Two strangers meeting thus, 
at a happy moment, after long silence, both charged as with elec- 
tric fluid, give out their vivid transitory light — it is the beginning 
and end of all their intercourse. 

Very curious revelations have I had of this nature. I have 
learnt more of some fellow-countryman of my own, in half an 
hour's talk in a wayside inn or a foreign diligence, than I should 
have ever gathered of the man through a whole life of ordinary 
acquaintanceship. Perhaps, in this manner, I have picked up 
more of what is called a knowledge of the world, than those 
who know my retired habits would give me credit for. At all 
events, I have learnt to appreciate the divQj'sity there is in 
human life, in modes of thinking, creeds, passions, characters. 
More of what is going on in the minds of men, has been perhaps 
revealed to me, than to many a stationary, respectable, influential 
citizen, who occujjies himself a large space in the public eye. 



I am in no disposition now to recall my first impressions of 
Switzerland and Italy. The incident of all my travels which is 
most salient in my memory, is the meeting with Clarence on the 



126 BOOK II.— CHAPTER V. 

borders of the Lake of the Four Cantons, and the long talks we 
had together. I have known no one who thinks on the great 
subjects of philosophy so ably and so hopefully as Clarence. If 
to me it has sometimes appeared that he steps too lightly over 
difficulties and objections, I yet almost always approve of the 
course and pathway of his philosophy. I would follow if I could. 
When revolving any subject, I often ask myself, What would 
Clarence say ? what would Clarence think ? and the answer 
given for him always helps me forward to my own conclusion. 
I have not been drawn towards him by that strong sentiment 
of friendship which I have felt for a mind much inferior to his, 
less disciplined, less systematically cultivated — I mean my poet 
Luxmore — but I have always felt that no man I knew was so 
entitled to my esteem. Even when, in his Utopian philosophy, I 
am obliged to drop his hand, and let him advance alone, I feel 
that it is his goodness of heart that is carrying him forward. 



CHAPTER VL 

MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 

My friend of the pavement in Regent Street, my artisan ora- 
tor, spoke energetically of the distress of the workman— of the 
miihitudes that were ill fed, ill housed ; and here he found his 
" motive power " by which society would be revolutionized and 
reformed. Whatever other influences were cooperating, it was 
this wide-spreading discontent of poverty that would impel a 
change which the wealthy would in vain resist. Clarence, on 
the contrary— albeit no man felt more keenly for the distresses 
of the poor— declared that our poverty would be relieved, and 
that distress of a physical kind would probably be nearly extin- 
guished, under our present existing system of society. He 
refused altogether to avail himself of hunger as his motive force. 
Hunger is to be fed forthwith ; by no means to be set to build up 
institutions. It cannot wait ; it has nothing to do with the fu- 
ture ; it must be fed, or taught immediately to feed itself— it is 
the worst of all legislators, and has no time for speculation. 

Where, then, if not in the physical distresses of man, did he 
look for a motive sufficiently potent to operate a change in the 
form of society ? For Clarence did look forward to change. I 
had come at length to the settled conclusion that we cannot spec- 
ulate on any new type of society, cannot frame a better than 
now exists ; that even if such were destined one day to be devel- 
oped, we were not in a condition to foresee what that type would 
be, nor by what means it would be developed; but I found 
Clarence still adhering to the old position he maintained at Ox- 
ford — that a new form of society, and one of which the great 
principle could already be laid down, would be, and was in the 
course of being, developed. To what influence did he trust ? 



128 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VI. 

What was to destroy a system fortified by the enormous force of 
habit, and itself springing from some of the strongest passions of 
mankind ? He trusted — to ideas, to the distresses of the mind, to 
the affliction of the well-fed, tlie well-housed, but tortured with cares, 
anxieties, and en?mites thai they hated. It was precisely, he said, 
when the distresses of poverty would be vanquished by the gen- 
eral advancement in industry, prudence, knowledge, that dis- 
tresses of another order would reveal themselves to the more 
sensitive and reflective minds of those advanced generations. 

When I have pointed out to him that periods of distress call 
forth schemes for new laws of property, — in later times for some 
species of Communism, — but that when the distress subsides, all 
such schemes sink also into oblivion, and are no more heard of 
till the next season of calamity, he has replied — 

" So should it be. And indeed we may be sure that all great 
social movemepts like these are regulated by the same wisdom 
that appointed the seasons or the tides. All such schemes do 
subside. They were the mere symptoms of the distress itself, 
and probably led, by the antagonistic efforts they called forth, to 
the speedier recovery from the calamity. The rich would unite 
their endeavours to get rid of a disastrous poverty that threatened 
the superstructure of the whole society. The scheme which will 
be really accomplished will come, let us hope, from reflective 
men, whose reason has been manumitted from the spell of urgent 
want, — from a generation of men who have solved the problem 
how to live, and who have especially set about to solve that other 
problem, how to live loell. 

" It is no part of mine," he continued, " to paint the existing 
condition of society in dark and gloomy colours, and then point 
to some social renovation as the remedy of all these evils. Some 
of these evils must be remedied before any higher order or scheme 
of society can be realized. Any such scheme can be only devel- 
oped in a community generally intelhgent, humane, and prosper- 
ous. It is from a prosperous condition, under our present system, 
that a higher system will be reached, — from a state of material 
prosperity that a higher morality, or that a system accordant with 
a higher morality, will arise. 

"It seems at first an unamiable characteristic of humanity 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 129 

that the remedy of one evil should be followed by an increased 
susceptibility to some other evil which before had beeii patiently 
tolerated. But is it thus that man advances. The removal of 
one pressing calamity never induced patience or tranquillity under 
the evils that remained. On the contrary, it gives courage to 
men to attempt the removal of these also ; it renders them more 
sensitive to such evils, or perhaps renders sensitive for the first 
time. Slaves that writhe under the whip are not disquieted 
about their political rights ; manumit them from personal slavery, 
and they become sensitive to political oppression. Liberate them 
from arbitrary power — let the law alone govern — and they begin 
to scrutinize the law itself, and desire to be governed, not only 
by law, but by the best possible law. And now, when the civil 
or temporal despotism has been set aside, and the municipal law 
has been moulded on the principles of an enlightened jurispru- 
dence, men probably wake to the discovery that they are living 
under some priestly or ecclesiastical despotism, and they become 
desirous of working a reformation here also. In fact, at each 
stage of this process the nature of the man is improved and his 
intelligence expanded, and, as one result, he becomes susceptible 
to evils which a coarser nature, and a more limited understand- 
ing, could not feel — could not take cognizance of. 

" The absolute want, the physical suffering of large numbers 
of the people, now absorbs our attention. Those who feel this 
suffering can think and speak of nothing else, and those who 
occupy themselves with the sufferings of others must be almost 
equally absorbed by it. No man can propose any thing for the 
general benefit of society without having this physical suffering 
placed first of all before him. Now, suppose this evil to be subdued, 
— I do not say entirely, — but reduced to manageable subjection, 
— do you imagine that men would sit down contented and recon- 
ciled to the thousand moral or social evils that remain ? You 
know very well that they would not ; that they would now feel 
those evils with aggravated acuteness, — with a quite novel sus- 
ceptibility. Calamities which, in the presence of hunger and 
cold, and every. description of bodily wretchedness, were scarcely 
recognized as such, would now, in their turn, become intolerable. 
Those who themselves are at present above want or poverty, 

6* 



130 BOOK IL— CHAPTER VI. 

nevertheless are still looking down at that abyss of misery and 
destitution beneath them, and while congratulating themselves at 
their own escape, they do not, and dare not, complain of evils of 
a less terrible character. They are silent on that anxiety which 
besets their own position and robs every household of its peace ; 
they are silent on that perpetual contest and strife of commerce 
which sows the seed of hatred so abundantly through every ham- 
let and village. Is not the wolf still at the door ? Are not others 
being devoured by famine, or dying of fevers ? We must not 
speak of minor evils. 

" But say that this extreme poverty were overcome, these 
minor evils, or rather these moral or mental evils, of our present 
system would rise sharply into view. Say that industrial arts, 
and that generally developed intelligence, have so wrought to- 
gether, that there are few people who cannot in a certain rude 
way ' take care of themselves,' will not the next thought be, — 
Cannot this earning of subsistence be conducted in some better 
fashion ? Cannot we erect barriers against the return of pov- 
erty ? Cannot we manumit ourselves from the constant fear of it ? 
Cannot we escape from that sense of insecurity in our social posi- 
tion, which afflicts all classes except the very highest ? We have 
bread — all of us ; we all have sense enough to get our portion in 
the scramble ; but must we always get it in this contentious man- 
ner, and hold it always with sense of insecurity ? We are fed 
and clothed — ^but at what a cost ? At the cost of perpetual strife 
and enmity, of habitual falsehoods, of anxieties, of hostile cupidi- 
ties. Cannot ' meat, clothes, and fire,' be got at less cost than 
this ? Without a doubt all the dim tumultuous grief which now 
lies smothered up and silenced amongst us would break forth. 
Men would ask themselves, and each other, in very earnest, — Is 
this the best that can be made of human life ? Must the mer- 
chant and tradesman be always driven, or always driving others, 
on the shoals of bankruptcy ? Everything is the produce of 
human labour — we know that ; but must each man earn his 
s])ecial share of the produce by an incessant scramble, trickery, 
deceit ? That I exercise hand or mind in some useful employ- 
ment, and receive in some shape my wages for the same, is 
nitional and just. But am I to study physic in my youth, and 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 131 

afterwards, in my manhood, study how to entrap a patient ? — 
how to secure a fee ? If so, the studies of my youth are far more 
noble than the practices of my manhood, and we must degrade 
as we grow older, — which is too often visibly the case. Good 
heavens ! if I have got some useful knowledge, let me use it 
after an honest, reasonable fashion. Am I to compete with an- 
other as able as myself who is to cure your malady ? Or am I 
to sit by, with placid professional etiquette, whilst some dullard 
kills his patient, lest I should be thought to be competing for the 
fee? 

" In nature, and as God gives it to us, how beautiful and joy- 
ous a thing is the harvest ! After many vicissitudes of weather, 
and much stout labour, and some natural and pardonable anxie- 
ties, the corn stands up ripe for the sickle. It is reaped, and the 
last load is carried, amidst jubilant shouts, in which every peas- 
ant boy is joining, safe to the granary. You would say that the 
business of the farmer had prospered, and was at an end. Not 
at all. The serious work is yet to follow. He has to sell this 
corn. Now come the dealings of the market, which, indeed, had 
all the summer long been casting their shadows before them, — 
w^orse shjyiows on his mind than the clouds ever cast upon his 
fields. Discontent is sure to cling to him. If his crop is bad, 
that is a palpable failure, and he has little to sell ; if it is good, 
why his neighbour's is good also, and so the price falls. Nothing 
would content him but that he only should have reaped well. 
With the last shout of the harvest-home — raised by those who 
did not own a straw in the produce — died away all happy, health- 
ful feeling in the business. The broad fields that repay his cul- 
ture, the open and variable skies, tend to make the farmer earnest, 
provident, and grateful ; the education of the market-place makes 
him querulous, crafty, envious, and an intolerable niggard. 

" Is there no way possible of combining activity and peace, — 
of bringing some portion of contentment into our daily lives ? — 
of living as if indeed we lived with God, and under the. perpetual 
care of His beneficence ? Ah ! who has not felt 

' The longing for secured tranquillity? ' 
And think you that men will not one day learn to put aside 



132 BOOK IL— CHAPTER VI. 

mutual jealousies in order to gratify this insatiable longing ? 
Who that has cultivated a high and reflective piety has not recog- 
nized that Religion does not first of all consist in hope of a future 
life, but consists first of all in living well here — in a certain felt 
relationship with God — in that happy, grateful, devoted relation- 
ship which springs from knowledge of God's world, and of our 
own humanity ? As an intelligent and exalted piety arises out 
of an advanced society, it will react upon society ; it is ever thus, 
both cause and effect ; the advancement of society purifying re- 
ligion, and a pure religion still further advancing society. 

" Ai\d bethink you of this — a great idea is also a great motive. 
If men revolve noble schemes for the public good, they are at 
the same instant prompted to realize them. It is not my pain, or 
my pleasure, that is any longer my motive, — it is the idea itself, 
how to get rid of many pains, and augment many pleasures, 
throughout the whole society. 



The misery of the better or the middle classes seems to have 
struck upon the imagination of Clarence as forcibly as the misery 
of the working class had affected the imagination of my operative 
orator of Regent Street. The fictitious, artificial, and precarious 
modes of industry into which even well-educated men are often 
compelled to embark, throw into constant jeopardy the social 
status they have obtained. To keep their foothold, they have 
to resort to expedients which sadly infringe upon the laws of 
morality, and which destroy their own self-respect. The very 
pleasures of life are poisoned by this anxiety or incertitude, which 
preys in secret on so many of us. "0 care ! " says the poet Cow- 
per, '•' my very roses smell of thee ! " 

" Look round you," Clarence would say, " from your place in 
some theatre, ringing perhaps with the most exquisite music, — 
look around and upwards, as the boxes rise tier above tier filled 
with the gay and the prosperous. To how many of the ' gay and 
the prosperous' who are sitting there, is the music jarred, broken, 
or altogether overborne by some corroding care, some impending 
calamity ! Who more enviable, you would say, than that bland 
paternal figure, seated between wife and daughter ? In vain 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 133 

are the melodies of Mozart or Bellini lavished on his ear, — his 
thoughts are in the half-hour spent that morning closeted with 
his attorney. I strongly suspect that that attorney's reception- 
room, with its few tin boxes and its array of jDapers, has witnessed 
more agony than the torture-cell of the Inquisition, or than any 
prison in the world. 

" I hate this gambling commerce ! " he would exclaim ; " it 
spares nothing ; it rings a bell and gathers a crowd of artisans 
together ; then, failing of its object, leaves them, for aught it 
cares, to famine or mendicancy. It robs right and left, friend or 
relative ; it takes the little fortune of the unmarried sister, — all 
that lay between her and the terrible charity of the world, — 
throws it on the heap, and stakes it all. It stakes every thing, 
and always wife and child. 

" It is not that all men wish to be gamesters. Most men are 
timid, fearful of change, solicitous to secure rather than eager to 
gain, and desirous of nothing better than steady labour and as- 
sured reward. But the wish is vain. The man cannot be secure ; 
the system does not permit it. The post he occupied is taken from 
him ; his trade declines ; his debtor fails, and he in turn becomes 
a debtor ; his health breaks, and the investments in which he had 
stored up his earnings prove worthless. He sees his children 
growing up, and knows not how he shall provide for them. I do 
not wonder that men go mad. 

" And think what exquisite suffering is occasioned to the wife 
by the cruel uncertainties of commerce ! Women are to be 
highly cultivated, delicately nurtured, every social affection devel- 
oped, — the maternal feeling almost to a painful excess, — and all 
this refined hfe and these acute susceptibilities are to be placed 
at the mercy, we will not say of a gamester, but are to be put in 
peril, let us say, by the want of skill and foresight, on the part of 
an honest husband, in the playing of a very ditHcult game. That 
husband has become unkind, severe, morose, as the game went 
against him. Some day the shattered irritable man discloses to 
his wife that he is on the eve of bankruptcy, — discloses it with- 
out any other warning than what she had received from daily 
exhibitions of ungovernable temper, produced by his fatal em- 
barrassments. I myself have known women educated like the 



134 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VI. 

daughters of princes, perhaps more refined and cultivated than 
the daughters of princes are hkely to be, — women who, as mis- 
tresses of their own homes, were ordering and controlling all 
things with graceful authority, — driven from those pleasant 
homes, with their children, by no possible fault of theirs, to some 
squalid retreat. There, if not deserted by friends and relatives, 
their own grief, timidity, and sense of humiliation, shut them up 
in solitude. I have known those whose smile made every one 
happy around them, quite lose the power to smile, grow weak, 
and wan, and querulous. 

" Very terrible to me is this combination of culture and inse- 
curity, — the warm and tender nest built so often on the rotten 
bough. How many a father, looking at his children, listening 
to their prattle, which speaks of nothing but hope and security, 
marking how, hitherto, they have grown up without toil and 
without care, half-brothers of the lilies of the field, and thinking 
in his secret heart what terrible reverse may be in store for him 
and them, — how many a father has watched his children at their 
play, and, notwithstanding all their beauty and all their joy, 
wished they had not been ! " 



Thus Clarence talked. It was the same strain that he held at 
Oxford. It was by merest accident that, whilst wandering about 
on the borders of the lake of Lucerne, I stumbled upon him. I 
observed a young man sketching, and made a little circuit in my 
path to avoid disturbing the artist, when, to my surprise, I heard 
myself hailed by my name, and, in a moment after, Clarence had 
seized me by the hand. 

We had not been very intimate at Oxford, which was proba- 
bly owing to my own reserve, or needless fear of being intrusive. 
I used to meet him in the shady walks of Magdalen, and, not 
wishing to disturb him in his meditations, I have passed by as if 
I saw him not, or have diverged into another path, yielding him 
the whole breadth of the avenue, far too narrow and straitened 
for more than one contemplative spirit at a time. When rowing 
up the river, I have watched him at some distance — he also in 
his own solitary boat — puUing leisurely under the shadow of the 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 135 

trees ; or, having made fast his boat by driving it amongst the 
rushes, I have seen him pull out a sketch-book from his pocket, 
or perhaps some volume to read. But whatever description of 
book it might be, I noticed that the hand that held it soon dropt 
by his side. Reclining in the stern of the boat, under the shadow 
of the alders, his eye fixed upon the horizon, he was already 
busied with his favourite speculation of the Future of Human 
Society. 

But though not intimate at Oxford, when we met here in a 
foreign country, and under the excitement of Swiss scenery, 
we hailed each other as old and cordial friends. Our fellow- 
studentship, which was but a cold affair in itself, gave us, here, 
at some distance of time and place, a title to the hearty hand- 
shake, the glad recognition, the frank outpouring of our several 
raptures and adventures in the beautiful country we were both 
exploring. We seemed resolved to delude ourselves into the 
belief that we had been all along quite bosom friends. At all 
events, we made up for our former taciturnity. What delightful 
rambles we had together about the lake of Lucerne ! And on 
those days which every tourist amongst the mountains knows and 
dreads, when the incessant rain confined us within the four walls 
of our room, O how we talked ! Fast and incessantly as it 
rained without, did we talk on within. We had to compare notes 
of those other travels we had been severally making in the 
region of thought — or that other cloud-land, if you will. The 
day was never long ; we wondered how it had passed. 

I knew that Clarence had the taste and skill of the artist ; but 
it was a surprise to me to learn, as I now did for the first time, 
that he had adopted landscape-painting for his profession. He 
led me off to a cottage in which he was lodging at the time. 
Near the window of his ai^artment there stood an easel, with 
the materials for painting on a table by the side ; and in an 
opposite corner of the room you observed another table, on which 
stood a lamp, a writing-desk, and a small pile of books. This 
arrangement, which he adopted wherever he pitched his tent, 
revealed the history of his day. When the weather and the 
light favoured, he was either sketching or painting, abroad or at 
home. When night came the lamp was lit, and threw its light 
over books and papers. 



136 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VI. 

To his friends, who thought highly of his intellectual power, 
Clarence seemed to have adopted a rather frivolous employment. 
He had formed another estimate of it, or else had selected it for 
the liberty it gave him to pursue unbiassed, in many a leisure 
hour, those graver studies which still probably held the first 
place in his regard. None of the three learned professions put 
before him for his choice, could he cordially embrace ; yet some 
profession was to be chosen. '•' I was glad," he said, " to find 
that nature had given me this httle talent, and so enabled me to 
decide a question which was becoming very embarrassing." 

" I inherited it," he added, " if such things come by inheri- 
tance, from my mother. She was fond of her pencil, and yet it 
M'as rather a love of nature than of art that distins-uished her. 
She sketched, she used to say, not for the poor picture she pro- 
duced, but because, by drawing the scene, she so thoroughly 
learnt it. She would make a study of some old tree, with the 
ferns and wild-flowers growing about its roots, and then, perhaps, 
throw away the sketch, or tear it up. I have it by heart ! she 
would say, and would carry home the old oak tree there, and not 
upon the paper. 

" Nothing dehghted me more when I was a boy," Clarence 
thus continued his narrative, " than to accompany her in one of 
her sketching rambles. I marched somewhat ahead, carrying 
the camp-stool and the sketch-book ; then, when by joint accla- 
mation we had fixed on our picture, I lay beside upon the ground 
watching her proceedings. By-and-by I began to imitate what 
I observed — brought supplementary paper and pencils, and also 
went to work — not disdaining, you may be sure, to look from 
time to time over the maternal shoulder, just to compare, as I 
said, our ' several styles,' our ' methods of treatment.' You will 
readily suppose that the mother was willing to teach all she 
knew ; lessons so pleasantly given and received, were not with- 
out result ; it was not very long before the son began to rival 
his instructress. 

" Years after, whilst meditating this perplexing subject, the 
choice of a profession, my eye fell upon one of my own draw- 
ings. Why not be an artist in earnest ? To give the men who 
live in cities some memento of what is most beautiful in the 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 137 

country, is not altogether a useless employment. But how 
determine whether I have the requisite ability ? I selected 
some half-dozen of my best ijerformances, and carried them off — 
not to any artist friend, but to a dealer in such wares. He 
bought them. That comphment I could trust. I set to work in 
earnest. You know what Wordsworth says — 

' The light mechanic tool 
Cuts off that hand with all its world of nerves 
From a too busy commerce with the heart.' 

" I have found in the pencil a constant and cheerful occupa- 
tion ; and, for the rest, I think my own thoughts in freedom 
about this marvellous world we are living in." 



Clarence's philosophy is full of faith, full of hope. Where I 
have ventured, only for a moment, to place my foot — placing it 
tremulously and soon retracting it, he takes his stand boldly and 
firmly. He has an unconquerable conviction in the progress of 
Humanity ; he will not hesitate cordially to adopt the last truth 
of the reason, because this seems at variance with the present 
wants of a progressive society. When an antagonist objects to 
some of his religious doctrines that they are fit only " for the 
climate of Utopia," his answer is, "I will believe, then, in the 
religion of Utopia ; and be you assured of this, that if its relig- 
ion is true, and is already here amongst us, what you call Utopia 
is following on behind." 

But his Utopian views are as safe, and, in the only rational 
sense of that term, as " conservative " as they are hopeful. For 
he constantly maintains that it is only by advancing under our 
present system of social economy that we can rise into a higher. 
It is the gradual development of a higher system, from causes 
already in operation, that he delights to proclaim. No sudden 
transition of a permanent character seems to him possible. How 
quietly slavery or serfdom vanished out of Europe ! Changes 
as great and as gradual may be accomplished in the future — 
may be now in the process of accomplishment. 

At Oxford, if I remember right, he was not quite so patient 



13^ BOOK IL— CHAPTER VI. 

in his expectations ; he brought the golden vision nearer to the 
eye. He could then with marvellous rapidity throw up into the 
air the light towers and gilded fanes of his Utopian architecture. 
At a later period he was contented that the slow builder, Time, 
should build on according to his wonted fashion. But he was 
as confident as ever that the glorious structure would arise, and 
he assigned to it even more magnificent proportions than before. 
What the arrangements and method of life would be in that 
Future Society, he was far too wise to think of predicting. A 
great principle would, in part, work out its own details ; in part, 
those details would be determined by circumstance, varying in 
every age and country. The extended action of a principle 
well known amongst us — that of mutual cooperation designedly 
entered into for mutual good — was all that he confidently proph- 
esied. 



He took high ground. " What, all ! " if any objector should 
exclaim : " do you expect that all men, or that mankind, as a 
general rule, shall be wise and good? — how few of such have 
ever lived at any time ! " — he would answer, 

" It will be easier for the many to be wise and good, than for 
the few. Think well of it ; it is more surprising that there 
should be one Phocion in Athens, than that there should be a 
city of just men. The sower goes forth, a sohtary man, to sow 
the seed. It is a social group, in full chorus, that brings in the 
harvest." 

"If a society," he would continue, "should in its corporate 
capacity take for its ultimate end mere physical well-being, it 
would not succeed ever; in that. It must also adopt for its main 
result the cultivation of the social affections, and the moral and 
religious feelings of man. Not only because this is the higher 
end in itself, but because only through this union of mind with 
mind, in their higher relations, will you obtain that unity of ac- 
tion you desire for mere physical well-being." 



I did not fail to urge against the principle on which Clarence 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER. 139 

depends — that of mutual coo23eration designedly entered into for 
mutual benefit ; or, in other words, a partnership in each other's 
labour — all those usual objections to which I myself had been 
compelled reluctantly to yield. I need not repeat them ; but I 
will record some of Clarence's replies. He would say, " I am 
not contemplating a society of learned Jesuits on the one hand, 
and a people of Paraguay Indians on the other — such a society 
is a type of weakness and imbecility, not of strength — but a 
society where the rule which governs all is made by all, under- 
stood and voluntarily obeyed by all. An intelligent obedience to 
such a rule I do most unhesitatingly aver to be the most desir- 
able element in each man's character and happiness that you 
could name. It implies no undue submission (as you object), no 
absorption of a man's individuality — any more than citizenship 
or patriotism. A rule which our own reason approves of is not 
a restraint ; it is a chosen course of action ; as freely chosen as 
any course of social action can be. But where I strike, as with 
a sledge-hammer upon this objection, is here : The development 
of the individual, you say, is to suffer, is to be repressed. Now, 
I maintain that it is precisely the development of a noble indi- 
viduality which will lead to this more social society. And again, 
it is precisely this society that must develop the highest indi- 
viduality. 

" Who feels so intensely his own personality, who has so large 
and* grand an individuality, as the patriot whose whole soul is 
given to his country ? But to descend to commonplace men and 
times, let any man but join a club, or any association for a com- 
mon purpose, and he feels his self-importance augmented directly. 
How can it be otherwise ? Our life and our personality are co- 
extensive. "We live only as persons. If I am a citizen of Athens, 
all Athens, so far as I can embrace it, has gone to swell my per- 
sonal or individual existence. There is no possible antagonism 
between the Individual and Society, none of this kind, that there 
can be a great society and little minds ; for just in proportion 
as the relationships of the individual to others, or to the whole 
society, are augmented, in precisely the same proportion is the 
individual being of each man augmented. 

" I see you acquiesce in this as a general principle, and you 



140 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VI. 

are prei^aring some yet and hut Stop them for a moment, and 
let me say a word on that other popular objection, that if we had 
not the present inequalities of fortune, the same trials, the same 
dependence upon each other's voluntary aid, there would not be 
the requisite means for cultivating the affections ; our friendships 
would grow cold ; and even the opinion of others would have 
little effect upon us, since we should no longer have to solicit 
favours of each other. 

" We meet with this style of objection from men who claim to 
be eminently practical ; and just note how eminently theoretical 
or hypothetical it is. Look at our existing society. 

" The services which cement friendship are reciprocal ser- 
vices. A feeling of dependence is scarcely compatible with 
friendship. 

" And again, where do we see the desire of esteem in the 
opinion of others acting most powerfully ? Precisely where it 
seems to have little to bestow, except this very esteem. In fact, 
it is the thousand subtle and indefinable services that men who 
live together must always be reciprocating that constitutes the 
great value to us of the good opinion of the society in which we 
move. What does an English gentleman suffer in his substantial 
or material comfort from being black-balled at a club, or excluded 
from any particular circle of society ? And yet the power of 
public opinion to punish could hardly be better illustrated than 
by just such a case. To the cultivated mind the esteem of man- 
kind becomes valued for itself. ^Nay, we need not go to very cul- 
tivated minds. The common soldier knows no greater pleasure 
in life than to be praised for his courage by his fellow-soldiers. 
The praise adds nothing to his rations. 

" I cannot suppose that any one contemplates a state of society 
in which there shall be no such thing as property, and no such 
thing as mutual gifts and services. But the gifts which pass be- 
tween wealth and poverty might be supposed to cease, and they 
would cease without any detriment to our social affections. What 
is more notorious than that wherever a pecuniary interest ap- 
pears upon the scene, friendship retires. Whether you take 
money from me, or whether you give it, the transaction is alike 
fatal to our old bond of amity. 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHEE. 141 

" No friendship can survive the gift of gold. The- generous 
can indeed forget that they have given, but the grateful can 
never forget that they have received. No ! The man who 
brightens with a smile when I approach him — whose hand 
grasps mine with cordiality — whose good opinion is a boon and 
support to me — whose talk, whose very presence gladdens me — 
he is my friend. He gives me joy — he gives ! This other, with 
his purse, he cannot give. He lays a load of obligation on me 
that I can never get rid of. This gold turns my friend into my 
benefactor. And oh, ye gods ! protect me from a benefactor as 
you would protect me from a foe ! I should be grateful — very 
grateful. I should serve him to the uttermost — I should put my 
neck beneath his feet — and I should be apt to pray him, once for 
all, to press upon it as heavily as he could. 

" What under the sun is more pleasant to behold than the 
home-bred affection of brother to brother, or sister to sister ! 
On what trifles does it feed when it is really at its strongest ! 
How near to extinction is it when the ' disparity of fortune ' and 
* the dependency on each other ' aifords the so genial condition 
for its development ! 

" See the affection in its native home — how confident, how in- 
destructible it is ! And the services rendered and interchanged 
are — mirth for mirth ! — the sport enjoyed together — the common 
lesson, the ride, the run, the emulation, the strife. For it is a 
plant so hardy that the gusts of natural passion or momentary 
anger cannot injure it — rather seem to promote its growth. 
Hardy and graceful, it bends and rises, and blooms, and lauglis 
again ; no flower of the field so braves the wind. 

" Now follow it into the world where it is to be nourished by 
the sterling benefits which the disparity of fortune enables to be 
given and received. What a degenerate and miserable thing it 
has become ! How suspicious and distrustful, hard and captious ! 
The prosperous one of the family is already accredited with 
pride and coldness before he has even shown these unamiable 
symptoms. Let him be generous as he will, his prosperity can- 
not be forgiven him. Between him and the less fortunate, all 
those light, pleasant evanescent acts of kindness, which arc the 
daily food of love, are rendered impossible. The benefactor ^an 



142 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VI. 

no longer ask for them — his request would be a claim ; and the 
recipient can give nothing, for he feels that he owes it all. 
The freedom of interchange and intercourse is gone. "When a 
brother lies under the cloud of adversity, he soon ceases to be 
lovable. His need and his irritability both make of him an un- 
welcome guest. Not suddenly is the door closed on the old 
familiar face ; but it opens to his hand, with more difficulty, each 
succeeding visit. Without a repulse, without a harsh word 
bluntly said, he yet feels that the entrance has become embar- 
rassing. It requires an effort to press down the latch, or to 
enter unsumraoned. I see him raise the knocker timidly with 
his hand — pause — replace it silently — and walk unobserved from 
the door. The dispirited man at length resigns his fraternal claim, 
and the affection of his youth is transformed into a dull and 
smouldering animosity. 

" Oh, why, Thorndale, do you set yourself in opposition to a 
faith in the future ? Neither you nor I are conspirators. We 
preach no revolution ; we incite to no discontent. We say that 
the prosperity and intelligence of mankind is leading to — other 
prosperity and higher intelligence. We offer additional motives 
and hopes to all the noble efforts which are being made to ame- 
liorate the condition of the less fortunate of society. And for 
ourselves, we have a faith that not only makes us hopeful of the 
future, but w^hich explains the past, and teaches resignation to 
the present. 

" It seems so bold a thing to say that crime will all but cease 
by the mere progress of our prosperity and our intelligence. 
Yet what are the all but invariable motives of those acts of 
violence and fraud which the criminal law takes cognizance of, 
and which a criminal jurisprudence punishes ? How horrible a 
thing is murder ! Yet I tell you what has often struck me as 
still more horrible ; — the paltry miserable motive for which 
murder is committed ; the piece of money that the dead hand, 
or the rifled pocket, must relinquish to the murderer. Men kill 
for this ! I can hardly call to mind, in the annals of our own 
jurisprudence, any one deliberate murder, in which this, in one 
form or the other, was not the motive. 

•' Go through the dismal catalogue of crime. It is always 



MEETING WITH A UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHEE. 143 

want, or some poiver that gold has over want, which forms the 
condition in which only the crime could be developed. The 
plotted seduction of a young girl seems at first to come from a 
quite different quarter. But look closely into it ; you see that 
the poor thing has been bought, and then flung aside. 

" Look at that which has been called the ' vice of great cities,' 
the source, in its turn, of every species of theft and corruption, 
and indeed the most prolific source of evil 1 could name. You 
have a class of women whose very trade (the means ' to take 
care of themselves ') is to propagate the vice they live by. It is 
their very business to break down the modesty of youth in 
every city of Christendom — modesty which is as natural, as 
graceful, and as conservative in the one sex as in the other. 
That very wise opinion so current amongst our youth, that dis- 
cards chastity from the list of manly virtues, whence did it come ? 
From any Epicurean i^hilosophy ? I think not. Well, what is 
the origin of this moral pestilence that walks through our streets ? 
It has precisely the same origin as other pestilences or plagues 
which occasionally desolate our cities — want ! Men and w^omen 
may at all times seek pleasure unwisely or intemperately ; but 
the trade of the prostitute, the foulest blot on our civilization, 
does not arise from our passions, but from want. Thank Heaven ! 
one sees there is hope here for the world. Murder and theft, and 
every vice that crowds our jails and peoples our madhouses, 
spring from a condition of things which is slowly altering even 
while we are looking at it." 



CHAPTER VII. 

REMINISCENCES OF CLARENCE — RETURN TO ENGLAND. 

" There is," said Clarence, " in South America a grass which 
has this peculiarity, that the young plant grows up sheltered in 
the sheath of the old one. The old blade of grass withers, and 
the new one is seen already prepared to take its place. For a 
certain time the new grass and the old appear to divide the field 
between them. Such is the' mode in which new systems or prin- 
ciples spring up amongst us. They grow under shelter of the old, 
and the transition is so gradual that a time intervenes when we 
can hardly say here also, whether it is the old grass or the new 
that predominates in the field. 

" The spontaneous passions of man — love of power on the one 
side, trust and admiration, and craving for guidance, on the other 
— build up some sort of government, generally of the despotic 
character. But, under the shelter of this spontaneous form, re- 
flection upon government itself becomes possible. There is, in 
the first place, something to reflect upon — the want and the pur- 
poses of government which experience has now taught ; and 
there is that degree of security and of leisure and safety which 
renders possible the existence of the reflective man. Thus new 
ideas spring up, and a wiser polity gradually pushes its way into 
the world. So too in religion. Spontaneous passions and wild 
imaginations first construct for us a celestial Governor oftentimes 
of dark and terrible nature ; but here too, by this spontaneous 
and imaginative faith, the action of a religious sentiment be- 
comes known to us — contemplation upon religion itself becomes 
possible — and the ideas of Governor and Creator are afterwards 
modified as our knowledge becomes enlarged, and as our own 
humanity becomes improved." 



REMINISCENCES OF CLARENCE. 145 

Clarence is one of the very few men whom it has given me 
pleasure to hear converse upon religion. This I attribute as 
much to the perfect sincerity of the man, as to the cheerful and 
exalted character of his piety. 

I liked one saying of his that he repeated more than once : 
" In religion, as in astronomy, we begin with a complete antag- 
onism between earth and heaven ; the stars are exclusively 
celestial, and those bright luminaries are infinitely more exalted 
in place and nature than the poor globe we tread on. We end, 
however, by discovering that this earth also is one of the celestial 
bodies. It, too, lies in the heavenly region. Lo ! we are already 
amongst the stars ! God is here too ! The Eternal and the In- 
finite ! — behold, they are around us ! " 



At another time he would say : " Great as is the truth of Im- 
mortality, I cannot possibly agree with those who represent all 
our goodness, and virtue, and piety, as dependent on it. It is be- 
cause I have a love of man and a love of God, that I dare claim 
this hope of immortality. Of course this hope reacts in aug- 
menting and establishing every noble sentiment. But I must 
have something that I admire and love for its own sake, or what 
is extended existence to me ? If I have no love for others here 
— no piety to God here — on what account can I wish or expect 
that my existence should be perpetuated ? " 



*' The love of God," he would say, " is no fictitious or dreamy 
sentiment. Our whole life is God's gift. And pray mark this : 
As the greatness and happiness of man's life develops, the gift is 
greater, and the love is greater. I could wish those who think 
there can^be advancement in human life, and not increase of 
piety, to ponder this. It takes but a breath to utter, it would 
take but a line to write it ; but its significance seems to me im- 
mense." 



Again : "Our scientific knowledge is not only new Power 
over the forces of nature — it is new Education for the mind of 

7 



146 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VII. 

man. God's universe, better understood, is precisely that teach- 
ing of God about which there can be no possible cavil. If He 
exists (and who can doubt it ?) this certainly is the manifestation 
of himself to us. Now, unite these two together. On the one 
hand is Science teaching us to knoiv God ; on the other, a Human 
Life growing ever more kindly, active, social, more opulent in all 
glad emotions and noble sentiments, prompting us to love God as 
the giver of it ; and how can you possibly doubt that Religion 
must advance ? " 

" St. Boniface, we are told, walked along our pleasant earth, 
with St. Jerome's treatise, De Bono Mortis, constantly under his 
arm. I cannot much blame St. Boniface. Pleasant as the green 
earth was, with its azure and beclouded sky above it, the race of 
men that surrounded him was coarse and violent, and utterly 
averse to that ideal of excellence he had formed. What could 
he do but place that ideal safely in another world, and wait for 
death for the fruition of it ? Even the St. Boniface of our own 
day may be excused if he shows the same tendency of thought. 
But this is noticeable, that the pious man of our own age sees 
more and more to admire and love in this world, in this life, — 
sees more of Heaven here ; and in future times a more perfect 
form of human society will be evolved ; and the St. Boniface of 
that epoch, the pious man of those times, will close his De Bono 
Mortis, — he will see his ideal, or aim at it, here also. His eter- 
nal life will have already commenced — he will have put on his 
immortality." 

Clarence was fond of quoting these noble lines of Milton, in 
which the poet depicts the religious sentiment of Adam in his 

Paradise — 

" A creature who not prone, 
And brute as other creatures, but endued 
With sanctity of i-eason, might erect 
His stature, and upright with front serene 
Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence 
Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven, 
But grateful to acknowledge whence his good 
Descends, thither with heart, and voice, and eyes. 
Directed in devotion, to adore 
And worship God Supreme." 



REMINISCENCES OF CLARENCE. 147 

" Magnanimous to correspond with Heaven !" "'Does it not," 
he would say, " stir Uke a trumpet ? And it does require a mag- 
nanimity, a courage of the soul, — a courage due to the ' sanctity 
of reason,' to correspond with Heaven, to w^alk ' erect ' in the 
presence of our God, but grateful to acknowledge whence our 
good descends. 

" Does not this express what each of us, in his noblest mo- 
ments, has felt ? 

" I boldly claim for the future generations of mankind, that 
religion which our best and purest have claimed for themselves, 
when they shall be saints in heaven. In that state they confess 
that Goodness and Piety are their own ends, — not preparation for 
any other state of existence. They will become so here. This 
life will cease to be regarded chiefly as a preparation for another, 
because it will have become identified with that other. If we 
are immortal souls, we are immortal here : — death is but our 
great progression ; — let us begin to live as the immortals should.' 



I used to say, there could be no possible objection to his claim- 
ing for some remote posterity the religious faith of the saints in 
heaven — if he could make them, or prove them to be, complete 
saints in other respects. — But I need not dwell on my own antag- 
onism to Clarence, for he very soon had to encounter a far more 
formidable and uncompromising opponent than I could be. Seck- 
endorf joined our party. 

It was here that I first made acquaintance with that extraordi- 
nary man, pitiless destroyer of all our day-dreams ; that is, if they 
pretended to be any thing else than dreams, and laid claim to his 
conviction as truths. If he might look at them as the dreams of 
others, or as parts of human life, he tolerated, and even admired. 
Such was the prevailing temper of the man. There was no line 
he more frequently quoted than one, to be found, I believe, 
amongst the occasional poems of Voltaire, — 

" Ah, croyez-moi I'erreur a son nitrite." 
Some day I shall try to recall the conversations of Seckendorf. 



.148 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VII. 

It shall be no disagreeable exercise of memory. But I will not 
commence my task just now. 



I gained much from the clash and conflict of opinions, as car- 
ried on by two such intellectual champions as Clarence and Seck- 
endorf. But after a time I wearied of the strife, and was glad to 
pursue again my solitary route. 

I went forward into Italy ; Clarence and Seckendorf returned 
to England. I spent some months at Rome, some at Naples and 
Sorento, and visited the other principal cities of Italy. 



Why did I return to England ? I had no home there, more than 
in any other part of the globe. Here I had the Alps, — what more 
could mortal man ask of nature ? Here I had Rome, with her 
Vatican, her St. Peter's, her churches, her galleries, — Rome old 
and new ; what more could I ask of art ? On what spot of the 
earth could a solitary man find so much to take him out of himself, 
— the kindest office that can be done to him ? 

Moreover, when I thought of returning to England, my heart 
began always to beat with disquietude. The whole island seemed 
but the abode of one little person. I had said that I would not 
visit Sutton Manor again till my cousin Winifred was married. 
No tidings of any such event had reached me. 



But besides that force of habit which leads us back to our na- 
tive country, I had one friend in England, or one whom I loved 
as such. Whilst upon the Continent, I had received a letter from 
Luxmore, in which he spoke of the great "crisis of his disorder" 
being at hand ; by which I understood that the poem on which 
he had been long engaged was about to be published. What 
success it would meet with, and what effect success or failure 
would have upon his plan of life, I was solicitous to know. I 
think, on bending my steps towards England, I ha*d no more defi- 
nite aim than the wish to see Luxmore aorain. 



KEMINISCENCES OF CLARENCE. 149 

I often think of him, even here. I was not destined to be for- 
tunate either in friendship or in love. There is something weak 
and effeminate, I suspect, in ray character. I clung to one per- 
son. My friendship has been almost as exclusive as my love, 
and both sprung up from early and intimate association. We 
were boy-friends together, Luxraox'e and I, 



CHAPTER VIII. 

LUXMORE THE POET. 

" Rise with the lark; your motions shall obtain 
Grace, be their composition what it may, 
If but with hers performed." 

These lines come unbidden to my ear. They were favourites 
of Luxmore. They are very graceful. I like that harmonizing 
of man's devotion with the bird's, and God looking favourably 
upon both. 

Of Wordsworth it may be said that his faith has so ample 
and so strong a wing that the thinnest and the lightest air sus- 
tains it. A weaker wing would fall fluttering down through the 
rare and ethereal medium in which his broad pinion floats so 
serenely. 



Wordsworth, Shelley, the whole host of meditative poets, rise 
up before me. Luxmore loved them all, and I think, in turn, 
believed in them all. 

" Of Shelley," he would say, " I am not an admirer of a large 
portion of his writings ; though there are poems of his, which 
have more affected me than any others I have read. The 
poetry of Shelley sounds to me like some wandering voice high 
in the air, and half lost in the echo of the hills. Only some 
snatches of intelligible melody descend to me, and they are very 
beautiful ; the song is scarcely human ; it comes as if from some 
wild spirit of the elements. The voice passed over our heads, 
proclaiming that Jupiter was not, that all above was bright 
vacuity, and bidding man be god unto himself. 

" You may be all 
You loill to be — happy, high, majestical." 



LUXMORE THE POET. 151 

Ay, but this ideal he is to will to be — this ' happy high majes- 
tical' — Whence came this? How was it our philosophic poet 
never asked himself that question ? He had these thoughts in 
his soul ; he had this ideal, but he knew also that he never pro- 
duced it, never summoned it there. What was this but the God 
manifested in his own soul, a manifestation akin to, and even 
greater than that which he refused to see in nature? Oh 
Shelley ! Shelley ! if you were bent on dethroning a Jupiter, 
whom a terror-stricken multitude were adoring, was this a rea- 
son for refusing to worship Him who had created that ' Love 
you loved so well ? ' 

" There were some few who started to their feet as the voice 
of the poet, half lost amidst the clouds, passed over their heads. 
They started, but soon, smiling at their folly, lay themselves 
down again. Let Jupiter be there, or not — or nowhere discov- 
erable to human vision ; man is not a god, nor his own Fate. 
Man and worm creep out together under the warm sun. Let 
that sun withdraw its light and heat, both man and worm creep 
back together into the dark mould. If man knows nothing 
else, he knows himself as creature — if the god-like is in him, 
then the higher creature. Be happy, high, majestical, but know 
this, that faith in your own Future can be but another name for 
♦faith in God." 



I give to Luxmore without scruple the name of poet, for 
though he is entirely unknown to fame — though his poem, alas ! 
failed, and perhaps not a verse of his is remembered except 
by a few personal friends, yet he had the peculiar characteristics 
of the poet — had at least the weaknesses we generally attrib- 
ute, justly or unjustly, to the poetic character. Wherever there 
was beauty or a noble emotion, there, I think, was truth for him. 
Philosophic or speculative inquiry seemed to end with him in its 
own mental excitement. A grand or beautiful thought was like 
any beautiful thing in nature, to be admired for itself. Philoso- 
phy, like Love or War, did but " add another string to the 
lyre." 

From earliest youth, and when we were yet boys together, it 



152 BOOK IL— CHAPTER VIII. 

was his secret ambition to be enrolled amongst the poets. Bitter, 
therefore, was the disappointment which ensued when, after long 
and elaborate preparation, he found that all his melody and all 
his metaphor were unable to arrest the attention of the world. 
From the tribunal of public opinion there is here no appeal. 
Judging with the partiality of a friend, I myself had anticipated 
another verdict; but a verdict once given on this matter of 
poetry is unassailable. If you write to instruct, and the public 
will not be instructed, the public may be wrong. If you write 
to amuse, and people will not be amused, you have not a word 
to say for yourself. And be quite sure of this, that if you have 
not amused your own contemporaries, you will not amuse pos- 
terity. 

Luxraore felt and acknowledged all this, and he at once 
succumbed. The failure was indeed complete. When the 
day arrived that the precious volume, prepared with such a 
labour of love, was to be given to the world, he had strung his 
nerves and steeled his bosom to endure manfully the shock ot 
hostile criticism. He expected much censure mingled with the 
praise. Not a word came to his ear of either praise or censure. 
Dead silence. Total neglect. For this he was not prepared, 
and his heart sunk within him. Against hostile criticism anger, 
or pride, or vanity would have interposed some shield; hope* 
would have still survived. But no enemy had done this. The 
blow came from the hand of Fate itself, and it laid prostrate all 
his hopes. The dream of fame, the glory of his life, was gone ; 
his melodious occupation was gone ; some new kind of futurity 
had to be constructed — some other Luxmore must live out the 
term of his natural existence. 

" There was no room," as he said plaintively, " for self-delu- 
sion. I had stood forth, shell in hand, to charm mankind with 
minstrelsy. Not one of all the passing crowd would pause to 
listen, or even look aside to see what manner of man it was who 
had put ' his singing robes about him.' Nothing remained but 
to drop what in me was mere mummery and masquerade, and be 
as soon as possible one of the undistinguishable throng." 



LUXMOEE THE POET. 153 

" I am smiling," he said once to me, " at the recollection of a 
certain midnight scene still very vivid in my memory. I see 
myself alone in a garden. A lantern is on the ground. I am 
digging a deep hole in the earth. I am certainly not digging for 
hidden treasure ; neither am I an assassin, burying, in the dead 
of night, the body of his victim. Yet I dig deep, and from time 
to time look stealthily around to see if any one is watching me. 
This hole, this pit, this grave is at length completed. I draw 
from under a neighbouring tree a sack which I had deposited 
there, heavy with its secret burden. This I lay, not without 
some solemnity of action, in its destined grave. It is indeed a 
dead thing : it is my dead poem ; and here I bury it — safe at 
least from further disgrace. Here I commit it to the earth. 
' Dust to dust ! ' I exclaim as I shovel in the mould ; ' ashes to 
ashes ! ' as I stamp it level with the rest of the soil." 



After this honourable burial conferred upon his defunct pro- 
duction, and in a mood, I suspect, of sheer despondency, he had 
yielded to the wishes of his father, and enrolled himself a stu- 
dent of law in one of the Inns of Court. When I returned from 
the Continent he had taken up his abode in the Temple, and 
spent his mornings as an industrious pupil in the chambers of a 
special pleader. 

It was a strange place to go in quest of my poet. Those dark 
quadr&,ngles where the lawyers congregate have always seemed 
to me a species of " intellectual factory," where a peculiar race 
of ingenious men manufacture, with infinite toil, an artificial sys- 
tem of jurisprudence, whose complications are infinitely afflictive 
to the rest of mankind. First, historical tradition, that should 
long ago have ranked with the curiosities of antiquarian learn- 
ing ; secondly, sound common sense, equitable maxims that rule 
mtelligibly the conduct of all mankind ; thirdly, a confused mass 
of statutes, so verbose no ordinary man can see the meaning for 
the words ; — such are the materials these intellectual artisans place 
together upon their looms. Yet they get devotedly attached to 
the web they weave. They fall into a kindred error to that of 
certain dogmatic theologians ; they think because the necessity 
7* 



154 BOOK IL— CHAPTER VIII. 

and desire for some law support all their strange devices, that 
these devices are absolutely indispensable to the support of 
law. 

It was a strange place to seek a poet in, or any one who had 
learnt to love thinking for the truth itself that was to be acquired 
by it. 

In search of Luxmore, I found my way into the pupils' room 
of a special pleader. I have no means of knowing whether all 
such rooms are like the one I entered. This might have been a 
bad specimen of the "factory;" yet those who inhabited it were 
men, as I afterwards learned, who had taken high honours at 
Oxford, and held what is called a good position in society. It 
had a most gloomy uninviting appearance. Young men who, at 
their own homes, sit in easy-chairs, and are waited on by assidu- 
ous domestics, might here be seen perched on tall leathern stools, 
such as the stationer's clerk tucks his legs- under, with a huge 
wooden desk before them, dark with age and begrimed with ink, 
and cut and carved like a school-boy's form. Every paper and 
book that lies upon it is covered with a coal-black dust. The 
window looks out on some blank wall or desolate passage, — or 
would look out, if it were not fortunately rendered almost imper- 
vious to vision by its own dirt. Here the accomplished scholar 
from Cambridge or Oxford, with ^schylus still ringing in his 
ear, and Newton's Princi'pia still occupying his thoughts, sits 
down to dreary books of Practice and Precedents^ — surely the 
most dreary things that printer's ink was ever employed upon. 
One would not say that a very finely graduated course of pro- 
gressive studies had been provided for our ablest men. And yet, 
mark what a natural charm there is in work, — in a real thing to 
do ! Into this pupil's room come the papers of a new cause, and 
there is a friendly scramble for them. It is real work. Here is 
the actual conflict of plaintiff and defendant to be carried on, by 
their help, in a court of justice. The accomplished scholar takes 
up the jargon of pleading with perhaps more zest than he had 
ever opened his Thucydides. Here is a real contest, — nearer to 
him than the Peloponnesian War, — the war of Declaration and 
of Plea, — Replication and Rejoinder, — I know not what. Those 



LUXMORE THE POET. 155 

dreary calf-bound books of Precedent and Practice grow instinct 
with life ; for there is a human interest which they are (however 
justly or unjustly) to determine. He sets to work. And now, if 
the garden of Eden — instead of that desolate blank wall — lay out 
there before him, he would not see it. There is light enough for 
books and paper, pen and ink ; it is all he will want for many 
hours. 

Pity so natural a zest had not a better element to grow and 
prosper in. As to my poor friend Luxmore, he too was not 
averse to labour. He was doing his utmost when I entered to 
fix his attention on his Stephens or his Chitty. With not, how- 
ever, so absorbing an interest but that he gladly carried me off 
with him to a small suit of chambers, occupied at present as his 
private residence. We climbed up a dark lofty staircase till we 
reached all but the topmost landing-place ; then he drew forth 
his latch-key, and we entered into his own most M??lovely retreat. 
How different from the little cottage-parlour I used to find him 
nestled in when he was — a poet in possibility ! It had, however, 
one advantage for a studious man ; though in the heart of Lon- 
don, it was quiet as the grave. 

When we had entered, he bade me notice, with a mock air of 
triumph, that on the shelves of his library there was not a single 
book that was not either law or history. Not a poet was admit- 
ted. Even his Latin and his Greek were confined to Cicero and 
Demosthenes, — the pleaders of their day. His only walk was to 
Westminster Hall. He did not think it quite safe to trust him- 
self, he said, in the Temple Gardens. 

Then he descanted very amusingly on the perfect stillness of 
his very learned domicile. " No lane in Devonshire could be 
more quiet ; no cottage in a Cumberland valley more secluded. 
Nay," he continued, " it is a great mistake to think you get quiet 
in the country. Did I not always find at my cottage window 
some old crone telling her interminable story to her never-satiated 
neighbour? And did I not catch myself often listening to it? 
Or was there not some sauntering damsel, with her tin can swing- 
ing and creaking on its iron handle, who would pass and repass 
twenty times a-day to get water from the spring. I rather liked 
at times to see her, and hear her singing to the creaking can ; 



156 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VIII. 

but then I was very idle in those days. Or else there was to be 
seen coming down from the lane opposite some red and roaring 
child, cramming bread-and-bntter into its mouth, cramming and 
roaring at the same time. No one ever knew what the noise w^as 
all about, and as the urchin's appetite was evidently unimpaired, 
no one seemed to care. I learnt myself to be a little amused at 
such display of harmless passion as he volunteered. He was not 
always sole actor in the drama. No such sights or sounds intrude 
here. Here we sit in profound abstraction. Nothing but abstrac- 
tions. No place so quiet — above ground — as these, my studious 
chambers." 

Notwithstanding this boastful renunciation of poetry and of 
nature, we had not sat long together before the '' old love," and 
his late bitter disappointment, became the subject of our conver- 
sation, and, in spite of some effort at irony, he treated the theme 
with a great deal more emotion than so devoted a student of law 
ought to have displayed. 

" But I am cured now," he finally said ; " I am cured, Thorn- 
dale, I am indeed. It seems a century ago since I was the prey 
to that turbulent and insane passion for fame, — insane at least in 
me. My lip curls with derision as I recall the folly. Was it I 
indeed who was plunged in despair because the world would not 
read my sonnets ! Simpleton ! How often had I said. What 
care I for the sons and daughters of wealth ? How often had I 
sung out the old stave, — 

' My mind to me a kingdom is, 
Such great delight I find therein.' 

But the sons and daughters of wealth held me in their power, — 
they would not read my poems. I was a mere slave after all. 

"And yet this passion was none of my seeking. Is it not 
strange that the love of fame should be given, and no answerable 
ability, — the instinct to soar, and no wing ? I can remember 
that, in my earliest boyhood, I paced my father's garden and 
the quiet lanes behind our house, muttering the 'I also !' to my- 
self. A certain noble mansion stands at the corner of Piccadilly, 
with a statue reared in front of it ; I have passed that house and 
looked up — how my cheeks burn as I make this confession ! — 



LUXiMORE THE POET. 157 

and I have said, ' Great general ! I am your contemporary, — I 
am a poet. Kings, generals, statesmen, poets, — the age is ours !' 
Fortunately I kept the secret of my greatness close within my 
own heart. 

" Well for me I did ; it spared me some humiliation. When 
the prophet at length stepped forward to reveal himself to the 
world and not an ear listened, and not an eye turned towards 
him, it was some consolation that he was able to steal home in 
peace. No outcry of any kind pursued him ; no one knew how 
great an experiment had been made I So far it was well. But 
oh, Thorndale ! the downfall there was within ! — within ! The 
life-purpose gone, the beloved occupation gone. 

" Ah, me ! how pleasant was the illusion while it lasted ! 
Pleasant beyond all power to describe, to walk amongst the hills, 
or by the side of rivers, musing immortal verse. I envied no 
one. I had my great task. What a proud elated spirit was 
often concealed in that simple figure that stole along with slow 
and modest footstep, shunning all observation ! I sought no 
honour yet — I kept my incognito ; but I was the true prince — 
and I felt like a prince. 

" Pity that the day of trial must come, and that the illusion 
could not last." 



It was inexplicable to me that Luxmore should pass at once 
from poetry to law. Could he find no intermediate stage ? I 
put the question. 

" They took me," he said ruefully, " when all things were 
equally indifferent ; they did what they pleased with me. If 
they had proposed hanging outright, I might have gently expos- 
tulated, but I should have yielded in the end. Aly father had 
set his heart on my being a lawyer. I am one day to be a 
celebrated advocate — an orator forsooth ! For such celebrity I 
care not two straws. Were I as certain of attaining it as I am 
that it is utterly out of my reach, I should not value it a rush. 
But here I am a student of the law, and I will be nothing but a 
student of the law — if I can." 



158 BOOK II.— CHAPTER VIII. 

His resolution was kept for some time. It gave me pain to 
see him labouring at a vocation so foreign to his tastes and capa- 
bilities. But he kept steadily to the new task he had assigned 
to himself, and would hear of no other plan of life. Poetry was 
held steadily at bay. 

One day, however, this Tempter waylaid him in a very insidi- 
ous manner. 

I think I see him as he described himself to me, returning in 
dreary mood from Westminster Hall, where he had been to hear 
some case argued, on the pleadings of which he had been en- 
gaged. I see him creeping slowly back to the Temple, wearied 
with the heat, and din, and jostling of the court, and utterly 
unable to think another thought about his pleas and his cases. 
As he coasts along by the shop-windows, he looks up from time 
to time at that strip of dim and defaced azure overhead, which 
is all that here remains to him of the natural sky ; and he takes 
advantage of the projecting step of some doorway, or of an iron- 
grating in the pavement, not trodden on by the passers-by, that 
he may pause for a moment, without being swept away by the 
crowd, to look up even at this poor residue of that fair region 
where the clouds are wandering. And now, as he is coasting 
thus along the Strand, he halts before a bookstall, because it 
offered an excuse for standing still, not from any curiosity to 
look at its literary ware. He does look, however ; and opens 
and prys into several volumes, till he begins to think that the 
proprietor of the bookstall, who has been eyeing him, will feel 
aggrieved if he departs without making any purchase. A torn 
and dingy little volume, very portable and very cheap, presents 
itself as a suitable purchase for the occasion. It bears the title 
of " Shelley's Miscellaneous Poems," a cheap piratical edition, 
that often finds its way to the bookstall. But of course the size 
of the volume alone determines his selection. He invests some 
eighteen pence in the perilous commodity, and walks off with the 
forbidden fruit in his pocket. 

Luxmore has done with the pupils' room for that day. He as- 
cends his own flight of stairs, and enters his own dark and dusty 
retreat. Seating himself at his library table, he may enjoy at 
least that perfect stillness he applauds so much. There is not a 



LUXMORE THE POET. 159 

sound to be heard. Drawing from his pocket his new purchase, 
he notices that, soiled and dirty as the book is, it could have 
been very little read, for half the leaves are uncut. He will, as 
he rests himself from his walk, cut open the remainder of the 
leaves, and then lay the book aside. As he proceeds with this 
mechanical operation, he peeps into the volume here and there. 
Gradually both the eye and the spirit of the man settle down 
upon thg page. What is it that enchains and enthralls him ? 
He has stumbled upon one of his earliest favourites, " Alastor, 
or the vSpirit of Solitude " — so full of the passionate love of 
nature and of beauty, and, to his mind, overrun with so many 
associations from his own past history. There, in the silence of 
his dim chamber, he reads on undisturbed ; I see his chest slowly 
heave, I mark a suspicious moisture in his eye. That library 
table, and all that is on it, and all the dreary learning mustered 
on the walls around him, are utterly forgotten. 

The old brass lamp of Aladdin never wrought such miraculous 
transformations as did that dingy little volume in the hands of 
its entranced reader. The solitary silent room — lo ! it was full 
of music, full of beauty. Vision after vision of mountain, and 
sky, and stream was passing along its walls. Those walls were 
not. And the dim air which lay so thick upon the windows — it 
was gone, and he w^as out in the broad bright world ; he was 
amongst the mountains, by the seas and the rivers ; he was in those 
palace-homes of Humanity, which that little magic book, this new 
lamp of Aladdin, was building up so fast around him. 

The mischief was irreparable. When the music of the poem 
ended, when the spell was over, when the magic book was closed, 
and he looked again on the four walls that surrounded him, he 
could scarcely believe that he had ever consented to this volun- 
tary but terrible imprisonment. What ! was he, a worshipper 
of nature, simply because his own hymn was not wanted — was 
he to turn self-banished from all her glories ? He would rather 
be a shepherd, and watch sheep upon the hills. Somehow he 
would break from this horrible imprisonment — would break forth 
into the real life of man, and the eternal realities of nature. 



160 . BOOK II.— CHAPTER VIII. 

When I next climbed his stairs, and tapped at his door, I wa3 
answered by a loud, ringing, manly voice, bidding me to enter ; 
and on entering, I saw Luxmore striding to and fro, clad in some 
terrific-looking waterproof garments, an oil-skin cap upon his head, 
and flourishing in his right hand a keen and glittering axe. He had 
resolved to emigrate. He would clear the forest and the jungle. 
He would grow corn where corn had never yet been grown. The 
banks of the Mississippi already lay in imagination before him, 
and he was just then making trial of some of his newly-pur- 
chased accoutrements. He laughed heartily at the bewilderment 
wdiich, I suppose, my countenance expressed. " I am for the 
woods, Thorndale," he exclaimed. " Will you go with me ? 
Leave this philosophy of yours, as I shall leave this labyrinth of 
law. Let us go where the great rivers are flowing. Believe 
me, no wood can be so thick, no swamp so deep, no wilderness 
so impenetrable, as these studies we shall leave behind." 



I, in reply, entreated him to stay with me in England. I 
thought him wise in relinquishing these ungenial studies ; I 
counselled him to devote himself to letters. I implored him to 
come and live with me. There was enough, I said, in the chest 
for both. A poet and a philosopher did not want the treasury 
of a Croesus. " Stay with me," I sdid, " and write another poem. 
One verdict is not a final decision in the courts of criticism, any 
ndore than in those of Westminster Hall ; we appeal, and again 
appeal — not to posterity, which is folly, but to our next volume ! 
Come, live with me. * Go halves,' as the boys say at school. I 
want your companionship, your friendship, far more than you 
can want any thing on earth that I can contribute. It shall be 
yours to pitch the tent where you will, and strike it when you 
will. We are both somewhat nomadic in our dispositions, and, 
for my part, I would rather that another chose the route and 
the camping-ground than be compelled to choose myself. Stay 
with me till the next poem is written. What lovely spots there 
are in England, no one knows better than you. Like the Persian 
monarchs, we will have our summer and our winter palaces ; they 
are already built for us amongst the hills of Cumberland, and on 



LUXMOEE THE POET. 161 

the coast of Devonshire. Pledge yourself to poetry and to me, 
for at least so long a time — and may the next poem be for ever 
writing ! " 

Luxmore pressed ray hand with emotion ; it was the only way 
in which he could express his thanks. " I too," he said, " if our 
positions were reversed, could offer, I think, as you do ; and you, 
in my position, would refuse, as I must." Then, in order that 
he might put his refusal on grounds to which I could not object, 
he declared that his present project of emigration was one that 
he greatly preferred to the scheme I designed for him — that of 
cultivating letters at home. "No !" he exclaimed, "I will live 
a free and manly life with the grandeurs of nature about me. I 
will feel poetry ; I will not write it. This passion for poetic 
fame is fatal to one's peace. It shuts you up from real friend- 
ships, real loves. You muse upon a thousand beautiful affec- 
tions, you sympathize with imaginary griefs and joys, and mean- 
while you yourself are forgotten by every living soul. I will 
have none of it. And as for this your England, I disparage it 
not — but only think what glorious things there are lying out in 
the wide world which I have not yet beheld. I have never been 
in a tropical climate. Could I quit the world without having 
once seen the palm-tree spread itself beneath its native skies ? " 



My entreaties were in vain. I had to listen to his schemes ; 
he would not listen to mine. He had indeed some relative in 
the United States, and the wherewithal to purchase a few acres 
of land. So much there was of practicability in his enterprise. 
But then I soon after learned that, although bound for the 
banks of the Mississippi, he had taken his passage to Rio Janeiro ! 
He must see the incomparable scenery of Brazil, and the moun- 
tains of South America. He would work his way round after- 
wards, by land or by water, to his final destination. 

What can one augur of such an emigrant ? TThat are you 
now, Luxmore ? I doubt not that you have seen a tropical sky, 
and that the vision of the palm-tree under its blue heavens has 
been realized ; you have seen the mountains of South America, 
but have you ever " worked your way round " to that farm on 
the Mississippi? 



CHAPTER IX. 

A poet's memoranda. 

Day after day till Luxmore left London did I climb the stairs 
that led to his rooms. There we sat and talked, and packed up 
things for the voyage. I cannot say that our conversation much 
facilitated this last operation, or often had any connection with 
it. Luxmore would sit on the corner of an open packing-case, 
and there hold forth on all manner of subjects. His mind had 
recovered all its former elasticity. Many a thing he said comes 
back associated to me with that never-to-be-filled packing-case. 

Sometimes we sallied forth together to see the " sights " of 
London. Was it not his last opportunity ? We bought a " Guide 
Book of London," and explored its wonders like two travellers. 
Where he went, I went ; to the Tower, to the Tunnel — many 
places I had never seen, and have already forgotten. 

One morning, as we were sitting in his chambers, and he was 
looking over and tearing up sundry old manuscripts and loose 
pieces of paper, a small memorandum or pocket-book fell out 
upon the floor. " May I read ? " I said, observing, as I picked 
it up, that it was partly filled with verse. " No ! no ! " he re- 
plied, " not now. But you can take it with you, and read it, if 
you like, when I am tossing on the Atlantic." 

The next moment, however, he had taken the book from my 
hand, and was reading aloud some verses from it. They were a 
very angry farewell to his unfortunate poetry — to his harp, as 
the phrase ran. They were written soon after the failure of his 
poem, and whilst he was sojourning, in no very cheerful mood, 
somewhere by the seaside. Here they are — 

" THE POET TO HIS HARP." 

" Pernicious toy ! struck with so feeble hand, 
The note but reach'd to the fond player's ear; 



A POET'S MEMORANDA. 163 

Barren, I fling it on the barren sand, 
And cui-se it here ! 

Most foolish, fatal ' instrument of woe ! ' 

That, while it prompts the melancholy thrall 
To sing a thousand joys he does not know-, 
Robs him of all. 

Where is mj^ youth ? Gone in a song unheard — 

Gone every stirring manly enterprise; 
For real passion, lo ! an empty word, 
And dreams and lies. 

And woman's love! — Ah, cruel trick of song, 

That fills the heart up to the very brim, 
Nor lets the man die out, though all have long 
Been dead to him. 

Delusion followed by a strange despair! 

Life lost — hope lost — in solitude I dwell, 
Like some pale anchorite whose faith — whose prayer — 
Died in his cell." 



" I dare say they sound tame enough," he said, when he had 
finished reading the Terses. " I know they were written with 
my heart in my throat. Generally I wrote slowly, but these 
verses, I well remember, came to me almost as fast as the pencil 
could trace them on the paper ; . for which reason alone I should 
suspect them to be worthless. 

" It is only time," he continued, " and the long and loved 
labour, that produces what is worthy to Hve. Oh that I, with 
this outstretched arm of mine, could engrave some few lines — 
some few — on the marble or the brass ! Death might strike it 
down the instant after." 

Aware, the moment he had uttered this last rhapsody, of the 
flagrant inconsistency into which he, who renounced all poetry, 
had been led, Luxmore dived down his head into the great pack- 
ing-case before which he happened to be standing, and became 
suddenly absorbed in the operation of packing. I spared him. 



After some interval he again took up the memorandum-book. 
It was the last, he said, of many such that had been carried about 



164 BOOK II.— CHAPTER IX. 

with liim. " In times past," he continued, " when I was still a 
poet — in possibility — every object seen, every transitory thought, 
had, or might have, some value for me ; ' it might be gold some 
other day.' Every pleasure came double ; and that reflex image of 
which was to make its appearance in my verse, was not the least 
prized of the two. Even painful and distressing emotions have 
not been without their consolation, for I have said to myself, ' I 
am glad I have felt this, I know now what it is.' I, had the habit 
then of jotting down, in some such ITook as this, any stray thought 
in prose or verse that occurred to me. That is all over now. I 
have no longer any use for my thoughts. I shall still wander on 
the sands, and pick up the shells and the bright pebbles as be- 
fore ; but there is no grotto building in the garden at home ; one 
by one I shall let them fall back again upon the ground." 



Notwithstanding what he said very prettily about there being 
no grotto building in the garden, it is evident that the scraps of 
verse in this little book (which I still, and shall always preserve,) 
were written after the failure of his poem, in the interval between 
that event and his being entered at the Temple. They have 
allusions, more or less direct, to that disastrous event, and have 
a desponding tone of thought quite foreign to the usual style of 
his poetry. 

He had been asked to write some verses in a lady's album. 
He had declined the honour, but had ruminated, as he went 
home, on the subject, and wrote the following stanzas : — 

" Ask poetry of him who shares 
The poetrj^ of life; 
Shares in its hopes, its loves, its joy, 
Its angers and its strife. 

Or ask of him who can recall, 

With many a fond alas ! 
The pleasing, painful memories 

Of days that do not pass. 

I have not lived ! I struck the chords, 

Childlike, to hear them ring. 
I have not lived ! then how could 1 

Give music to the strinsV" 



A POET'S MEMORANDA. 165 

Then he adds, in a sort of parenthesis, — " Yes, I wrote before 
I had lived, and see that too, now, as one of my folHes. And yet 
— mark how the matter is entangled — you want your youth to 
write with, as well as to live with. You want, too, your youth 
to enjoy your laurels if you win them. Love and Fame, I find 
few care much for them except in youth." Which reflection 
seems to have suggested the lines that follow : — 

" The youth is sitting by a river, 

He turns to where the stream covies down. 
* Flow on ! sweet Time ! thou bounteous giver, 
Flow faster still, and bring 
My myrtle wreath, my poet's crown! ' 
— 'Tis thus I hear him sing. 

By the same river sits the man. 

But 'tis the current that has pass'd him by 
I see him silent turn to scan. 

No longer to the river does he pray ; 
Something he follows, with a curious eye, 
Half weed, half flower, it bears away." 



I notice that, like many other poets, he is a great favourer of 
youth. Here are two verses that contrast the boldness of this 
season of our life with the timidity of age, in the region of specu- 
lative or theological inquiry. I doubt whether fair justice is 
meted out to the old man. 

" In youth we climb the hill, and trace, we think. 

Upwards the stream of Truth. We find the spring. 
Alone Ave kneel, or, as we stoop to drink. 
Hear but the rustle of some angel's wing. 

Age comes ; we drink with angels on the hill 

No more. Contented in the vale we dwell; 
And jostle through the village crowd to fill 

Our broken pitcher at their stagnant well." 



I make the following extract from the little pocket-book, be- 
cause it shows how a melancholy humour had been creeping into 
his own speculative inquiries, and how he, too, had been sharing in 
our conflict of opinions. Both our great Futurities are here can- 
vassed, embraced, and dismissed. At least, so thought the writer 



166 BOOK IL— CHAPTER IX. 

at the moment. Happier times brought, as I well know, happier 
and more stable convictions. 

. . . . " A straggler from all folds, 
I roam in unclosed pastures. I have sought 
The bondage of a Faith, yet still am driven 
Back to the unwelcome libert}^ of Doubt. 
— Hail to Utopia ! Happy golden Time 
That will, but will so slowh'-, come. I, too, 
Hear the glad music of the onward march. 
It conies this way. It dies upon the wind. 
It comes not. While I strain my ear, it sounds 
Fainter and fainter, farther, farther off. 
— All hail celestial climes ! Eapt on this faith 
I rise, I also, with the throng of saints, 
And take my place in Heaven. — Trembling I sit, 
Conscious of dust and mutability. 
Not mine these seats eternal of the gods : 
Mine nothing but this trance, this dream of thought. 
In which gods, too, appear and pass. — Will Death, 
With soft mesmeric breathing on my brow, 
W^ake to new life ? or, with slow moving-hand. 
Touch this wild dream into the perfect sleep? " 

What a critic would say to this allusion to the mesmeric influ- 
ence, I cannot tell. I feel as incapable of criticizing Luxmore's 
poetry as I should my own. 



The chrysalis and the butterfly has been a favourite image 
with the poets, and from time immemorial it has been dedicated 
to hope — the hope of immortality. How came it that my friend 
Luxmore, whose philosophy was generally of a cheerful charac- 
ter, should make so perverse a use of it as he has in these lines ? 
He sees a silkworm spinning its cocoon, and makes the following 
reflection : — 

TO THE SILKWORM. 

" You, too, soft, mute recluse, a thread can spin 
Subtle as thought, and bright as poetry. 

Weave on ! weave on ! Ask of no passer-by 
How the web looks to him: 'tis gold within. 

There, in your golden orb, close folded lie; 
There muse on change, there wave the future wing. 
Wave it in dreams, and dream eternal sjiringy 



A POET'S MEMORANDA. 167 

I once asked him why, smce his verse was not successful, 
he did not write prose. The answer was characteristic. He 
said, — 

" Thorndale, I could not write prose, if by prose you mean a 
didactic expression of settled systematic opinions. I have no 
systematic opinions. It is not that, in general, I am indisposed 
to beheve ; but one belief destroys another. There are too many 
truths. And there are truths of negation as well as of affirmation. 
I cannot help it. There are some subjects on which the more I 
read, and the more I think, the more bewildered I become. To 
me it seems that our world is veritable poetry, — suits admirably, 
and suits only, the poet's verse ; for there are tilings most beau- 
tiful and grand in it, and these individually may be faithfully 
reflected in the poem. But philosophy attempts to embrace the 
world as a whole scheme, and philosophy fails, — ^only impresses 
on it an irremediable confusion, the result of her own limited 
intelligence. 

" A poet does not say to mankind, This, and this only, is true, 
and you will find it consistent with every other truth I shall pro- 
claim. He says, I feel this, at this moment, to be true ; so much 
of the living world I can portray to you. You ask sincerity of 
utterance from the poet, not systematic thinking. He who 
writes in prose comes forward to teach other men the final 
results of his own inquiries — results supposed to be all congru- 
ous with each other. Such final results, such congruous scheme 
of thought, I, for one, never hope to obtain. Meanwhile, here 
and there flash across my mind unmistakable truths, or generous 
sentiments, which surely it is well to utter, though in a partial 
and disjointed manner. If I kindle a noble thought or feeling 
in any human breast, I have not written quite in vain. 

" And tell me, Thorndale, have you not observed that there 
is a certain freedom of utterance allowed to the poet which is 
denied to the prose writer — for this very reason, that he is not 
expected to follow out to its last logical result every opinion or 
sentiment he expresses. Truths that have not yet found their 
place in any recognized or approved scheme of philosophy, are 
tolerated from one who is not held responsible for schemes of 
philosophy. Have you not observed that our boldest thoughts 



168 BOOK II.— CHAPTER IX. 

are put forward in snatches of verse ? Averse, like the mask 
used on the Greek stage, sends tlie voice farther, and partially 
conceals the speaker. What if one use of the poet be to give 
some notes and fragments of truths which he himself, as little as 
any other, can yet harmonize into a complete system ? Such idea 
has occurred to me when reading some of our own poets. As 
to myself, I have gained more philosophy from Wordsworth and 
Tennyson than from all the grave treatises which the Reverend 
Josiah Springfield used to put into our hands." 



" If I had been born an idolater," Luxmore said at another 
time, " I might perhaps have been amongst the first to suspect 
that his godship was mere wood and stone. But if another 
raised the sacrilegious spear, I am sure that I should have 
rushed forward for the protection of the idol. What have I 
then to do with teaching the strict stern truth to others ? I 
leave that task to other men — to you, if you persist in undertak- 
ing it." 

" I know not," I replied, " that any of us can do very much. 
Some of us will do little enough, and yet even that little may 
be worth the doing. Before the hay is finally stacked, it is 
tossed about in the sun and the air, and very little hands may 
be seen busy in the field. If too hastily packed together, it 
would smoulder and corrupt. I too, with other children, toss 
about the hay in the field. A stronger arm will stack it. It is 
a trivial service, but not a needless one." 

"Very modestly said, O my philosophic friend," answered 
Luxmore. " Toss, then, this hay about ; only do not blind 
yourself, as I have seen some little children do, whilst throwing 
it too thickly over their heads. 

" God fashions some in one way, some in another. Me he 
made — so far as this thought-power is concerned — a much mus- 
ing, but weak and useless creature — all ear, all eye — and plunged 
me in this maze of beauty and of wonder. I have had no other 
business than to look, and dream, and eternally admire. And I 
will still admire, earning the while the needful daily bread, with 
daily and inoffensive toil." 



CHAPTER X. 

CONCLUSION BY THORNDALE OF HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 
SKETCH. 

I LOST my friend. I bade farewell to him in the great 
steamer, as it lay off Southampton, which was to bear him 
across the Atlantic. What would I not have given to detain 
him ? I loved him as a brother, and as an elder brother. I 
was accustomed to yield to all his humours. If he said Walk, I 
walked ; if he wished me to sit with him, I sat. I felt a pleas- 
ure in this sort of submission. The mutability of his temper 
never vexed me ; whilst the utter frankness of the man, the full 
heart, the incessant spring of life and thought within him, were 
to me inexpressibly delightful. Would that, by any grappling- 
hooks, I could have bound him to me ! 



When I parted with Luxniore at Southampton, I went across 
to the Isle of Wight with no other than the old companion — the 
box of books. Even those books, how much more would they 
have yielded to me, if the social affections had not been so utterly 
baffled and repressed ! 

I was unfortunate in friendship as in love. The exhilaration 
of general society I have occasionally shared. But what my 
nature craved was some attached companion, living under the 
satne roof with me, to make of my dwelHng-place a home. 
Wanting this, it seemed that all other enjoyments were robbed 
of their natural zest. 



170 BOOK IL— CHAPTER X. 

More desolate and life-weary I never remember to have felt, 
than I did in my little cottage at Shanklin. But just as the 
question, What was I to do with this great gift of life ? had 
reached its climax of embarrassment, there came intimation that 
the gift itself would probably be soon withdrawn. Tlie difficulty 
would be solved in a very decisive manner. Symptoms of ill- 
health, which 1 had been able to disregard whilst in the com- 
pany of Luxmore, now forced themselves on my attention ; they 
became more serious every day. 

I could not but remember that my mother died of consump- 
tion ; and these symptoms seemed to assure me that I had 
inherited the peculiarities of her constitution. 



Since my return to England I had not even written to my 
relatives at Sutton Manor. I allowed them to think that I was 
still on the Continent. Now it became necessary, on some mat- 
ter of business, to communicate with my uncle. I wrote. Ami- 
able messages came in return ; abundant regrets to hear of my 
ill-health, and an especial chiding from Winifred for my unsocial 
habits. Unsocial ! I think that the pain of solitude was at this 
time, more than any other cause, fostering that malady under 
which I was growing weaker every day. 



Was that drama of the Moth and the Flame entirely played 
out ? Yes, I thought so ; yes, and yet a scrap of writing in her 
hand, containing a kindly word, such as she might bestow on 
any old friend, had a strange power over me. But let ill-health 
and a fevered brain bear the blame, if Hope, and wild imagina- 
tions such as Hope creates for her own support, did at this time 
revisit me. 

I can recall one singular delusion. I was reclining on my 
couch on a sultry day. The window of my cottage was open, 
and it looked directly into a garden. In this garden I saw 
the figure of a lady standing amongst the flowers, and occa- 
sionally bending down over them. Her back was turned to- 
wards me, and I could see only the figure and one light tress of 



CONCLUSION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 171 

hair that had escaped between the bonnet and the silk mantle. 
That little tress was enough to set Imagination at her work. 
The most absurd fancies took possession of my mind. What if 
it were Winifred ? She had heard of my illness ; she could not 
hear of it with indifference. What if her affections were still 
disengaged ? -what if, secretly, they had all along been engaged 
where she herself was most beloved ? She had heard that I 
was suffering — in illness — and alone ; she had resolved to come 
and see at least her old friend and playmate. Yes, it might be 
— it must be — it ivas Winifred Moberly ! That fair tress could 
belong to no other ; I had seen the winds playing with it a hun- 
dred times in the park at Sutton Manor. She had persuaded 
some of her family, or some relative, to accompany her. She 
had left them behind at the hotel, and had come on alone. She 
seemed to be occupying herself with the flowers, but she was 
only in reality preparing herself for her* interview with her 
stricken cousin — stricken in health — stricken, as she knew, in 
more than health. 

I watched breathless — my heart beating violently — till the 
figure should turn towards me. It turned — looked up a moment 
at the cottage, and walked trippingly away. It was a fair young 
girl — very fair — but not Winifred. Some flowers in the garden 
had attracted her, it seems ; and as I sate out of sight, the open 
window led her to conclude that there was no one in the house, 
and that she might gratify her curiosity unnoticed, 

Winifred Moberly was in her own beautiful garden, or sitting 
in her own drawing-room, with many friends around her. Why 
should she concern herself with the sick exile out here ? 

How could I be so mad as to think it ? Yet, madness or not, 
my thoughts, for several days, ran in this direction. What if she 
should come ? 

" O come, come ! " I murmured to myself. " Lay your hand 
upon my shoulder. Arrest, detain, restore me. Give me health 
— give me hopeful thoughts — give me faith, as well as life, — ^you 
can ! " 

And then again I bethought myself, that my life had so long 
ran in one sad and monotonous tenor — I knew not how I should 
support the sudden turmoil of a great joy. " Folly ! Folly ! " 



172 BOOK II.— CHAPTER X. 

I exclaimed. " Why do I suffer such delirious thoughts to in- 
trude on me ? What should Love do here in the very ashes of 
a man ? A great haj)piness would be to me a great trouble ; I 
have not been cultivated for happiness." 

Such contradictory and most needless soliloquies was I utter- 
ing from my sick couch. 



Consultations now ensued with this and that eminent physi- 
cian. Consumption ! Ay or no ? And at length the decisive 
Yes ! and intimations that the disorder was assuming a very per- 
emptory form. 

One moment of sharp and confused agony as this broke on me ! 
then a calm, which has not since deserted me. Never had I suf- 
fered from such utter depression of spirits, never felt so hopeless 
in my quest of truth or happiness, never felt so entirely without 
task or occupation, aim or purpose, for the coming days, as in 
this last retreat in the Isle of Wight. I have no wish to recall 
the hours I spent there, or the thoughts that there afflicted me. 
And now suddenly life was over ! except just to watch the day- 
light down. No task, and no joy, would any more be wanted. 
One sharp confused agony, as I have said, one sudden turmoil, 
as the little vessel swung round through the dizzy whirlpool into 
her last port, — then a brief space, which the eye could easily 
measure, of smooth water, was all she had to traverse. 



And now I am here in my last beautiful harbour of refuge, 
and that solitude, which has been both a pleasure and an affliction, 
is now only a pleasure. 



No, Lady Moberly, I will not have a medicus. Bernard, it 
seems, has betrayed me. He has been writing boastfully to some 
of his friends in England, that he is now physician and apothe- 
cary, as well as valet, cook, and I know not what besides. And 
so my lady, in her sjDrightly vein, writes me word that if she does 
not soon hear that I am under proper medical surveillance, she 



CONCLUSION OF AUTOBTOGRAPfflCAL SKETCH. 173 

will come over to Italy herself, bringing with her a doctor in each 
hand. 

Very kindly said, Lady Moberly, and I think kindly felt ; but 
^ve defy you. Bernard and I will go on in our old way. 



The day is never long. I have indeed ceased to take note of 
the measurement of time. One hour is more genial than another ; 
— thought flows more raj^idly, or these damaged lungs breathe 
somewhat more freely at one time than another ; but where the 
present hour stands in the series which makes up day and night, 
what the clock reports of the progress of time, I have ceased to 
ask myself. There is but one hour that the bell has to strike 
for me, 



BOOK III. 

CYRIL ; OR, THE MODERN CISTERCIAN. 



'• The instinct of repose, 
And longing for confirmed tranquillity." 

Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CISTERCIAN MONK. 

There stands in my terrace, its branches partly hanging over 
the wall, a beautiful acacia-tree. I am told that it is of a rare 
Asiatic species, called by some long name, which I shall certainly 
misspell, Acacia jidihrission — Latinized Persian, ^w^, a rose, and 
ebruschen, silk ; because in the spring it has a blossom with long 
depending stamens — a sort of silken rose, or silken tassel, as some 
call it. That I shall see the blossom is not likely. 

To my taste, the tree is so beautiful that I doubt if the combi- 
nation of the flower with it would be really an improvement. 
Not only is it a charming object in itself, but it is most fortu- 
nately placed. Seen from the villa, it is thrown with most grate- 
ful contrast upon the blue sky, and mingles most happily with 
the prospect of the distant mountains ; whilst on the terrace itself 
it casts a most acceptable shade, and that on the very spot you 
would select for your seat, as commanding the most perfect view. 
I often have my chair or sofa brought underneath it. 

When I sit here under the acacia, and look downwards and 
towards the shore, there is only a small portion of the coast that 
is visible to me. The bay runs inward, and I lose the coast-line ; 
but at one place it makes a slight curve outward, and I am able 
to see any straggling fisherman, or rambling pedestrian for a few 
moments, who may chance to pass over this spot. If the person 
walks steadily on, it is a very short time that I hold him in my 
field of vision. 

But along this spot there sometimes passes, in slow and meas- 
ured step, the solitary figure of a monk, It is always the same 
monk. It is a youthful figure, and by this time I know the step. 
He wears, top, a garb not very usual, — the white habit of the 

■ 8*' 



178 BOOK III.— CHAPTER I. 

Cistercian order. This appears to be a favourite spot with him, 
for he sometimes pauses here, looking at the scene, or rapt in his 
own contemplations. I could hardly give any intelligible account 
of the strong feeling of interest I have in watching the figure of 
this solitary and youthful monk. As he stands there in his seclu- 
sion, and I sit here in this hermitage of mine, how much there is 
of similarity between us — how much of contrast ! How differ- 
ently we come to he made I He little suspects, while he stands 
there in perfect solitude as he thinks, that he has come within 
the field of vision of one who has been watching for his appear- 
ance, and who is making him the subject of endless specula- 
tions. 

I have the advantage of him probably in this respect. Whilst 
I can sympathize with him, he would have nothing but reproof, 
or pity, for me. He would regard the Protestant hermit up here 
— if he knew any thing of him — with some repugnance, as being 
more or less a heretic ; whilst I, on my part, have always had a 
strong and secret sympathy with him and the life he has chosen. 



One reads of some Buddhist saint, that the prince his father, 
in order to wean him from his absorbing piety, offered to give 
him immediately all his wealth, and bade him at once take pos- 
session of the royal treasures. The saint replied : '' If my advice 
were followed, all this gold and all these jewels, and this wealth, 
would be placed upon wagons, taken to the Ganges, or the Ya- 
muna, and thrown into the stream ; for they cause only sorrow, 
lamentation, grief, crime, and disappointment." How this cart- 
ing of our wealth into the Ganges, or the Thames, would com- 
port with our theories of Progress of Society, one does not see. 
But assuredly this proud determination of the high contemplative 
soul to rid itself at once of all the shackles that want or cupidity 
would hang about it, is one of the noblest sentiments of the indi- 
vidual mind. It is also one of the earliest that history takes 
note of. 

It is one of those irreconcilable congruities of which all human 
life is full. Do we not move and live by constant antagonism ? 
and is not one part of society in necessary antagonism to another ? 



THE CISTERCIAN MONK. 179 

Be that as it may, there are movements of every kind in this in- 
finite world of ours. There is room for all. 



The great whole shapes itself by its own laws. Yet we must 
each of us be shaping. Well, that too is one of its laws ; it thus 
in part shapes itself. 

" I cannot mould these light and fleecy clouds into any shape, 
blow as I will," cries a young child of Eolus ; " they shift and 
change at every instant." " Blow on ! blow always ! " replies the 
elder god. " It is you who mould them nevertheless — such 
moulding as they take. Child of Eolus, blow on ! " 



I have just returned from the gardens of the Villa Reale. A 
carriage puts me down at the entrance, and I walk very quietly 
along the gay and fashionable promenade, till I reach some seat 
that is sheltered, and favourable to repose. All have not that 
last quality. There are some of white marble, supported on a 
brick pediment, painted bright scarlet — very pretty, I suppose, to 
look at, but very ill suited to my purposes. As I creep along, I 
jDause from time to time, leaning on the railing that surrounds 
some one of the statues which decorate the gardens. 

I never till now felt myself quite at home in a scene of this 
description. In vain I used to say to myself that the very crowd 
concealed me, that my appearance was precisely of the very kind 
to pass unnoticed in the crowd — that, in fact, no one did see me. 
I was conscious that I had not the air and manner of the place, 
that a certain abstraction of mind, or stranger-like feeling, .made 
itself apparent, and marked me out for what is called a " nonde- 
script " — such as young ladies steal one glance at, then turn away 
their pretty heads to hide a smile of ridicule, not very fearful, and 
which they themselves could not explain. A nondescript, I sup- 
pose, I always have been. Man of fortune — man of pleasures- 
man of business — man of letters — nothing of the sort. It would 
have been a puzzle where to put me on the roll of men. Now 
I can look around me quite calmly on all mankind, and all 
womankind too. The question, " Who and what are you ? " has 



180 BOOK III.-CHAPTER I. 

a ready answer. It is read in the emaciated visage of tlie man. 
I am described, I am catalogued. This dying-out is a recognized 
occupation amongst us. I can now sit and look about me as un- 
abashed and apathetic as the most accomplished of idlers. I can 
even scan and criticize these modish people themselves, and specu- 
late quite composedly upon them. 

It is a race one gathers little from. Empty as a bell, and as 
monotonous. Some one writes that the listless coxcomb seems 
as if he had grown tired of his part. I suppose that the fashion- 
able men of imperial Rome had the same fatigued and apathetic 
air as our own idlers ; and that when they came to enjoy the 
beauty and the breeze of Naples, they too were just as incapable 
of any such simple enjoyment. Simple enjoynients retain their 
charm only to the occupied and the earnest. 

I find myself turning from the silks and satins that float past 
me, to watch a group of ragged children, wild as young goats, 
that are playing outside the grille which separates the gardens 
from the street. Their untutored nature affords at least a more 
varied spectacle. One of the group, a little girl, is sharing a 
green and sour-looking apple with a boy who has begged a bite of 
it. Oh, what a bite he takes ! A full half of -it is gone. She 
only once, and in silence, glances at the hugh devastation he has 
made; and proceeds, without a reproach, to munch the residue 
of her sour dainty. What greed in the fellow ! What a native 
untutored ladyhood in that silent, brief glance at the devastated 
apple ! 

I like these statues in the public garden. They form a mute 
society for the mute and solitary loiterer. They give him also, 
to the eyes of others, a manifest excuse for loitering and musing 
there. He may lean upon the iron rail that encloses the stone 
god or goddess, and whether he meditates or observes, or what- 
ever thoughts or emotions may be stirring the depths of his soul, 
he stands there a manifest worshipper for the time being of some 
Diana or Apollo. His pensive humour is thus disguised ; and I 
take it there is no greater departure from good behaviour than 
that of fronting the world with your own earnest thoughts. 

" If there is any antidote," poor Luxmore used to say, " which 



THE CISTERCIAN MONK. 181 

is at all times effective against the poetic mood, it is the presence 
of a fashionable woman. I was never caught riding my Pegasus 
by one of this order that I did not dismount in trepidation, and 
walk rapidly on, utterly disowning any connection with it. The 
fair sex," he would say, " stands to us in the two most opposite 
relations imaginable. They are the most ideal objects in our 
world of thought ; they are the very embodiment of whatever 
is artificial and conventional in civilized life. I hold it orthodox 
doctrine to believe — for Milton has taught it — that the flowers 
in Paradise were created as Eve's especial dowry, and tfcat such 
of them as she was permitted to carry away with her, have de- 
scended in due course of inheritance to her daughters. The rose 
is woman's ensign, her crest, her universal emblem. She is the 
spirit of beauty here below. Nay, what, I ask, is our angel of 
heaven but some beautiful girl seen paler in the celestial light — 
paler, brighter, not more beautiful ? Such is woman in our 
ideal world ; she peoples heaven, or makes earth seem like to 
heaven. 

" Now look at her," he would say, " in all the glories of mil- 
linery, and invested with the omnipotence of fashion. Oh, ye 
gods ! convert us into apes, or dancing-masters, that we may not 
sink under the glance of her ridicule ! Well, but she is very 
charming here also, very pretty in all this lace and satin. Yes, 
and with her quick bright glance of exquisite impertinence, how 
well she rules the manners and the talk of every drawing-room ! 
Every coarse ungainly folly flies at that bright smile of derision 
which she so proudly throws around her — every coarse, ungainly 
folly, and also every earnest, free, and manly thought. A soft 
modulated cynicism whispers around her; a bland, courteous, 
hypocritical adulation. Before the lovely ivoman we may be 
mad enough ; for we take the lyre, and we kneel and worship. 
Enter the decorated lady, we stand erect, and bow graceful, if 
such art is in us, and change the poem for the pasquinade." 



To some such tirade I replied that it was the male coxcomb 
only that I should venture, or feel disposed to assail. There is 
a certain ostentatious imbecihty in his character that renders it 
utterly detestable 



182 BOOK III.-CHAPTEK I. 

" Detestable enough ! " he cried. " See that supremely idle 
gentleman drawn in his luxurious carriage ; he is drawn along 
the earth by two of God's most beautiful creatures (those horses 
should be inmiortal !) — and he sits stern and lethargic, feels, or 
affects, the most perfect indiflference to all that state and all those 
means of enjoyment which, nevertheless, I and the rest of the 
world are called upon to admire. 

" Now this I hate. I am to admire this man twice over ; first 
for his gilded trappings, and next for his supreme indifference to 
them. JVIy honest friend, the purple-breasted peacock, swelling 
with uncompromising vanity, spreads to me his whole orb of 
feathers, and struts like an emperor before it. Him and his 
purple pride I like. He is magnificent ; let him know it, and 
rejoice. But this other most unnatural bird displays to me what 
pomp he has — or borrows — and walks himself with sniffing dis- 
dain before it. After applauding his magnificence, I am to ap- 
plaud still higher because he flings my applause back into my 
face. 

" I am no reformer of societies — have no faith in imaginary 
systems — think a M. Fourrier simply an ingenious lunatic ; but 
if his phalanstery threatened no greater evil than the extinction 
of the race of coxcombs, male and female, he should have my 
permission to try his experiment. These youngsters we see 
tapping their lazy heels with their absurd cane, or poisoning the 
fresh morning air with the hot stench of their tobacco-smoke, are 
not the breed of men I am solicitous to preserve. 

" Never have I met with such weary dreary gossip as from 
young men of what is called fashionable life. It is not nonsense, 
ibr nonsense requires some invention ; it is mere parrot-like 
noise. They travel mightily ; they pass from Paris to Vienna, 
from Vienna to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and you 
shall hear from them always the same tattle they would have 
amused you with in Regent Street. Cosmopolitan indeed ! as I 
sometimes hear them call themselves. Cosmopolitan as dogs are, 
who are as much at home in the streets of Paris as of .London." 



fbE CISTERCIAN MONK. 183 

When I had quitte^l to-day the Villa Reale, Bernard thought 
fit to drive me through a part of the town of Naples. Life in the 
Toledo Street cannot be accused of want of animation. With 
what noise and fury the old game of buying and selling is car- 
ried on here ! What variety of parts and characters in this 
perpetual masquerade ! Masquerade it is not. Each one lives 
most thoroughly in his own limited personality. That is one 
of the most striking things in life. Just as a cat or fox is most 
entirely and solely a cat or fox, and has no thought of being any 
other beast whatever, so that noisy huckster is entirely the huck- 
ster ; and if the Virgin Mary will be kind, and prosper him in 
his bargains, he will live and die contentedly as a huckster. 



Every man carries, and can carry, the burden of his own grief. 
Thoughtful men, of the prophetic order, would take up the bur- 
den of the whole world. No wonder that they cannot bear it — 
that it crushes them to the earth. 



I am glad to regain my own retreat — this elevated and beauti- 
ful sanctuary of mine. 

How still it is ! what a sacred serenity ! I can understand 
how ecstatic visions and mysterious voices may visit the lonely 
imagination. A very little more, and I too could hear the whis- 
per of some spirit in the air, whispering to me my own thoughts. 
It is in such a calm as this that the voice of the angel becomes 
audible. 



This calm, that seems so natural, and puts on the aspect as if 
it had been, and would be, eternal — I have bought it with a whole 
life of turmoil and unrest. So it is. Yonder sea may be eter- 
nally serene, but my felt serenity has the tempest for one of its 
conditions. 



Eternal calm would soon be eternal sleep. This often recurs 
to me when thinking of our ideal futurities. 



184 BOOK III.— CHAPTER f. 

We will make such a garden of this world, says some gentle 
enthusiast, that all good and peaceful affections, and none but the 
good and peaceful, shall flourish there. Only the angelic part of 
our nature shall be developed in this Paradise. I look through 
the golden gates of this new Eden ; with hand raised before my 
eyes, to shade them from the perpetual glory, I look through, 
and in the serene air and eternal summer of the place I do at 
length descry the angelic inhabitant. I see him beneath the tree 
of life, pillowed on his wing — and fast asleep ! 



There stands my Cistercian monk on his favourite spot. 

In him there are unspeakable fears that perpetually sustain 
illimitable hopes. A constant sense of escape from peril, gives 
constant sense of the. near-attained heaven. The element of the 
tempest is, or has been, there in abundance. 

There he stands serene, self-centred. He will tell you that he 
was born but yesterday, and will leave the world to-morrow. Yet 
such as he stands there, he is the product of all the centuries and 
half the nations of this world. Not only the Hebrew, but the 
Egyptian and the Persian sage, the Indian and the Greek, have 
contributed to his religious culture. Yet he feels himself alone, 
a transitory wayfarer through a quite foreign w^orld. 



And to himself how simple and beautiful is his own life. Some 
manual labour (this the Cistercian rule requires), his prayers, 
and some charitable offices, give employment to his days. All 
his vacation-time is spent in heaven. Prayer is at once his 
means and his end, his occupation and his joy. 



" Progress of Society " concerns not him. No genuine saint 
was ever solicitous about the future destiny of this poor planet. 
He has no salvation for this terrestrial humanity. He has one 
for you and me, for this and that human soul, for all who will 
obey and tread the narrow path by which, one by one, they shall 
pass onward into bliss eternal. 



THE CISTERCIAN MONK. 185 

What is Utopia to him ? Why should he care for the well- 
being of successive generations of mortal men ? The eternal 
beatitude of one immortal soul outweighs it all. 

What is Utopia to him ? Sentence has been passed against this 
world, the execution is only delayed ; flames will consume it ; 
and, for final result of all its painful history, lo ! his little flock of 
angels winging their way into the sky ! 

Your bright terrestrial futurities would only disturb his 
thoughts. He wraps the world in shadow, that he may better 
see that future home amongst the stars to which he is bound. I 
find the piety of my Cistercian monk to be one of the most beau- 
tiful things on earth, but I could secure no place for it in an 
imaginary society such as the hopeful Progressionist depicts — a 
society of cheerful activities, of general temperance, of estab- 
lished equity. It would have performed its part in promoting 
the advent of such a society — in forming the future man ; but it 
would vanish and be absorbed in the success of its own work. 
The perfect saint would become the perfect man ; the worldly 
character and the heavenly would blend in harmony. This 
monk's piety lives necessarily in a world of sorrow and of peni- 
tence, and its paramount sentiment is that of renunciation. 
" Thrones, sceptres, crowns," are metaphors which at times run 
wildly enough through his discourse — descended to him probably 
from the earlier notions of the Hebrew Messiah ; but they do not 
express the real nature of his spiritual joy. This is wrung as 
much out of Sorrow and of Penitence, as out of Love or Hope. 
Not of gold or of velvet is that crown made which the saint 
presses on his brow, and carries with him triumphant into 
heaven. 

I see my monk kindling the sacrificial flame before the altar. 
He throws in his wealth ; he throws in his pride. He had 
thrown in his love to woman first of all. At each renunciation 
the flame burns higher and higher. Such fuel there was on 
earth to feed this flame ! How will it- burn in that other sky 
where there will be no guilty pleasures, and no sorrow-laden 
happiness to throw upon the pile ? 



186 BOOK III.— CHAPTER I. 

From my watch-tower here, I often observe how, as the day 
goes down, the sea becomes illuminated- by the moon, which till 
then had shed an unnoticed and ineffectual light. At first a 
luminous track, scarcely perceptibre, glimmers over the trembling 
waters ; but as the sun still farther retires, the broad pathway of 
light grows bright, distinct, and permanent. I find it difficult to 
believe, when my eye is fixed on this new and beautiful radi- 
ance, that it is really growing darker and darker all around me ; 
and that this luminous pathway to the skies, thrown, as it were, 
upon our troubled ocean, becomes visible only when the earth 
lies in darkness or in shadow. 



When my Cistercian monk appears on this curve of the shore, 
stands there in meditation, and then slowly departs, I follow him 
in imagination to his cell, and speculate on the causes which may 
have conducted him to that last retreat. Has he sought a shel- 
ter there from the temptations of the world, from the turmoils of 
life, from the violence of passion ? Or has he shut himself up 
to tame the restless intellect ? And is it the conflict of human 
opinions that he has sought to avoid ? 

Whatever may have been his motive, Philosophy herself, I 
think, would bid him rest in the retreat he has chosen. The 
Angel of Goodness stands at his pillow, and Truth waits for him 
in the antechamber. With how sweet a smile, even on his delu- 
sions, will she welcome him, when the life-dream is over ! 



What different strains of reflection does the monastic life sug- 
gest ! For me, I jot down my thoughts as they arise. I am 
conscious that there is an apparent inconsistency between them. 
Yet, if it were worth while, I could show that the inconsistency 
is more apparent than real. You sketch in two figures or objects 
in a landscape — there seems no coherence between them. Fill 
in the rest of the picture, and they perfectly harmonize. It is so 
with our thoughts. 



CHAPTER IL 

A VISIT TO THE MONASTERY. 

In my ride yesterday I passed a group that could not but 
arrest my attention. It consisted of two monks, one of whom, 
much the younger of the two, had sunk exhausted by the road- 
side ; the elder monk was kneeling by him, supporting the head 
of the fainting man in his lap. 

I stopped the carriage, and, leaning forward, asked if I could 
possibly be of any use, at least in conveying one or both of them 
to their monastery ? The ready Bernard was of more use than 
I, for he had alighted from the box, and before any one had time 
to remonstrate, he had applied a flask, whose contents were not 
drawn exclusively from* the crystal well, to the lips of the ex- 
hausted monk. It revived him instantly, but he was still so 
weak that my proposal to carry them to their monastery was 
accepted. The elder monk assisted his companion into the car- 
riage, and then followed himself. 

On looking at the pale sufferer, I recognized in him the same 
youthful monk whom I had been in the habit of watching from 
my terrace. 



Few words passed during our ride. When we reached the 
monastery, the elder of the two invited me to enter. Curiosity, 
and perhaps some interest deeper than curiosity, prompted me 
to accept the invitation. 

How still it was within those high walls, and along those 
courts and cloisters! Here the hum of human life seemed 
hushed by some mysterious terror hanging in the air. No 
sound of joy, no voice of affection, no spontaneous utterance. 



188 BOOK III.— CHAPTEE II. 

The very greeting given to the two returning monks was a 
monotonous ejaculation in a dead language. 

Retirement from the world I can understand ; but why should 
these walls shut out the view of nature on every side ? Is there 
guilt on the brow of those ethereal hills ? Or does the genuine 
saint of the Catholic Church see already, in all this beauty, noth- 
ing but a world in ashes and a condemned planet ? With head 
bowed down, and looking neither to the right nor to the left, he 
has but to steal through it safe ; he, for his single part, to steal 
through the general ruin and perdition — safe ! — safe ! — safe ! 



The younger monk retired immediately to his cell. The elder 
monk remained with me in conversation. He gave me some 
account of the rules of the community. He and his brethren 
were of the Cistercian order, and adopted the Benedictine rule 
in its original strictness, working with their own hands, and sup- 
porting themselves entirely by the cultivation of their own land, 
of which he intimated they had not an acre more than was 
necessary. Most of the simple articles of clothing and furniture 
they required were manufactured by themselves, and all pro- 
cured directly or indirectly by their own labour. He was solici- 
tous to impress upon me the distinction between their order and 
that of the mendicant friars, who carry round their sack from 
door to door, and whose mode of procuring subsistence he seemed 
by no means to approve. A few of their, number, who possess 
a certain amount of medical knowledge, employ themselves more 
particularly in attendance upon the sick. The community could 
also boast of having some learned brethren amongst them, whom 
the rest very willingly relieved of their share of manual labour, 
in order that they might devote their time to study. There was 
much in this social organization which one could not help ad- 
miring. If Clarence had been present, he would have told the 
good monk to throw down these high walls— to let in the light 
and joy, and beauty of nature ; to have the musical voice of 
children heard upon the turf ; to let in the love of woman, and 
make a happy M'orld of it at once. 

If such a tliought passed through my mind, I certainl}'- did not 



A VISIT TO THE MONASTERY. l89 

give expression to it. As we were conversing, a message came 
from the younger monk ; he would be happy to see me, and thank 
me for my poor services in his private cell. He had quite re- 
covered from his temporary indisposition, the result merely of 
too long a walk, taken in his vocation of visiting the sick, and of 
a diet altosfether too abstemious for health. 



I entered a little cell — study and dormitory both — most simply 
furnished, but clean and neat as a young maiden would have 
wished it. A pale youth in the white robes of his order, was 
sitting there. Hitherto this monk had only spoken a few words 
in a low voice, and those in Latin. When he now addressed me, 
he spoke, to my surprise, in English. 

But he not only spoke in English, the voice was j^erfectly 
familiar to my ear. Through all the disguise of the monkish 
dress, the truth at once flashed upon my mind, and I exclaimed, 
" What ! Cyril — you ! " At this exclamation, a mutual recogni- 
tion immediately took place, for illness had thrown a temporary 
disguise over me also. I had not seen Cyril since that meeting 
in Wales. 

If I had given myself a moment's time to reflect, I should 
have hesitated before j)ronouncing his name ; I should have been 
afraid that the recollection which / should awaken would have 
been painful and embarrassing. My anxiety, however, would 
have been very needless. The previous states of mind he had 
passed through (as, I believe, is the case with most convertites) 
seemed to have been obliterated from his recollection. He spoke 
as if he had been a confirmed Catholic all his life ; he already 
manifested no other anxiety than to assist me in becoming one 
also. 



A conversion which a few years ago would have been thought 
unaccountable, has now become a commonplace event. The road 
to Rome (with various diversities in the track) has been trodden 
by many of my contemporaries. The Calvinistic tuition of 
Evangelical parents — the Book all in all — Criticism — Ration- 
alism — Skepticism — return to the Book with aid of Church 



190 BOOK III.— CHAPTER 11. 

authority, traditional faith, and a living, Heaven-appointed 
Priesthood — such are the chief stations in a route that has been 
lately a good deal traversed. I wonder what posterity, a hun- 
dred years hence, will say of this phase of our intellectual con- 
dition. " On the wings of what logic did these our ancestors 
fly ? " they will perhaps exclaim, " How did they contrive to 
reason themselves back to the abnegation of their reason ? " 
But there are other wings than those of logic, and other powers 
than that of reason. A great Hope, or a great Fear, once kind- 
led in the mind, will not be destroyed, and in one way or the 
other will remake for itself whatever postulate it needs for its 
support. 

I expected to hear much of the unity of the Church, of the 
necessity of obedience in matters of faith, and other topics of a 
kindred nature. I was agreeably disappointed. Doubtless Cyril 
is a firm believer in the Catholic Church, and all these topics 
have weighed with him ; but I suspect that it was the life of the 
monastery which he especially sought in joining the Catholic 
Church. He wished to surrender himself to Faith and Piety — 
to have no more questioning — to make of his religion a life ; and 
this was the method he adopted. 

" I myself entered the Catholic Church," he said, " by the gate 
of the monastery. A retreat from the world, which should not 
involve the intolerable condition of absolute solitude, and which 
should be accompanied by punctual offices of devotion, was what 
my heart craved, was what my soul needed. The Catholic 
Church opens this fold within the fold. Say it was my weak- 
ness which made this retreat so inestimable to me ; with utmost 
candour and unfeigned humility I will admit it ; but, whether 
from weakness of faith, or strength of devotion, I not the less 
stood in need of it. Thus only a peaceful, pious, harmonious life 
seemed possible for me.'* 

" And you have gained what you sought ? " 

•' Oh yes ! yes ! Thorndale, I have ! I have ! I cannot de- 
scribe to you what I feel in my happier and more favoured mo- 
ments ; what I feel when the simple chant of our choristers lifts 
my soul to heaven. Yes ! to heaven ; for in these moments it is 
fruition more than hope that is given to me. Ineffably sublime 



A VISIT TO THE MONASTERY. 191 

must be the home of angels and of saints, but to my present 
capacity for bliss this humble earth sufl&ces. To my ear this 
chapel melody tells all that is ringing elsewhere from innumer- 
able harps of gold. Shall I confess it ? I have already moments 
of ecstasy higher and more thrilling than I know how to sustain. 
Some poet's image, learnt in other days, is floating in my mind, 
of an angel-harpist, muffling between his wings, which he draws 
close before him, the very strings of the harp he touches ; its 
music is so piercingly sweet. Some such image I might adopt 
to shadow forth this state of repressed, and all but intolerable, 
ecstasy." And as he spoke there stole over his pale and ema- 
ciated countenance a glow of rapture, to which, I think, the 
ardours of the poet or the lover would seem tame, trite, and 
evanescent. 



Think coldly or contemptuously — as you probably will, if you 
are a strict uncompromising advocate of truth — of many of the 
doctrines interwoven with his creed ; but tell me if, looking 
around you at the existing crowds of men, you can anywhere 
find a more beautiful life than this which Cyril now lives. His 
hands have their labour, his heart its charities, his soul its aspi- 
rations. It would be idle to object that, if all men were to retreat 
into a life of celibacy, there would be soon no living world to re- 
treat from. All men, we know, will not adopt, nor feel the least 
disposition to adopt, any such mode of existence. If 'a few 
choose to live apart thus, and to set in many things a peculiarly 
high example to the rest of mankind, they are doing a good ser- 
vice to the world. Very praiseworthy is the active navigator ; 
he comes and goes, and brings the treasure of all climes together ; 
but be who keeps the beacon-light upon the hill — he, too, is at 
his post. 

On my departure, Cyril inquired where I was living, and find- 
ing that it was not an abode likely to introduce him into much 
mundane society, and as quiet withal as his own monastery, he 
proposed to find his way to Yilla Scarpa. I know the motive 
that will bring him here, but he shall be very welcome never- 



192 BOOK m.-CHAPTER U. 

theless. And lie shall preach or teach his Cathohc faith if he is 
so minded. 

And this, then, was the solitary monk I so often watched and 
speculated on, as I sat here under the acacia-tree ! My poor 
friend Cyril I he whose past history and trials have constantly 
dwelt in my mind, as amongst the saddest of tragedies I have 
ever personally become acquainted with. 



CHAPTER IIT. 



A MENTAL CONFLICT. 



There is a contradiction — denied by no one, deplored by many 
— between the books and teachers that, in our generation, contrib- 
ute to form the religious conviction of every inquiring youth. 
Books which he is not only permitted but invited to peruse, tac- 
itly or openly contradict each other, and contradict that teaching 
which he has received from schools and catechisms. The evil is 
irremediable. Every one who reads and thinks at all must enter 
into the conflict, and reconcile his various teachers with one 
another as best he can. The evil is irremediable, but it is an 
evil nevertheless. 

A pious and aftectionate youth may, without blame on his part, 
commence his career of independent thinking by a rebellion 
against some of his most sacred feelings, by a violence done to 
his best affections. His peace of mind is disturbed, and the har- 
mony of the family circle is broken, by an invisible enemy, who 
has stolen upon him in the very hours of study and meditation. 
Those earliest and dearest friendships, as well as those first and 
sacred convictions, which should have lasted him his whole life, 
are put in jeopardy at the very outset. 

For some time our inquiring youth keeps his doubt a close 
prisoner within his own bosom. At length, one day, being more 
daring or more despondent than usual, he gives expression, in 
the family circle, to some of those skeptical questionings he has 
been secretly revolving. As soon as the words have passed his 
lips — how those lips trembled as he spoke ! — he feels that it 
was not an opinion only he has uttered, but a defiance. And 
it is not an answer, but a reproof, that he receives. An elder 
brother frowns, a sister weeps, a parent solemnly rebukes. Sad 



194 BOOK III.— CHAPTER III. 

and inauppicious entrance on the paths of inquiry. He retreats 
into himself, perturbed, disdainful, with a rankhng sense of injus- 
tice done to him. 

Beyond the family circle the case is little better. In general 
society he soon learns that the subject of religion is altogether 
inadmissible. There is but one thing more distasteful to well- 
bred people than a religious sentiment or opinion, and that is the 
least show of opposition to it. You must think over these mat- 
ters — if you must think — in perfect retirement. The one half of 
society requires that you respect its faith, the other half that you 
respect its hypocrisy. 



If it happens that, whilst our youth is still in this state of doubt, 
the needful business of life — commerce or a profession — carries 
him off to quite other trains of thought, no great harm seems done. 
A subject of inquiry to which nothing invited but its own dis- 
turbing interest, is gradually laid aside, and he joins a consenting 
or conforming multitude. Yet, even in this case, the question 
mooted in his earlier days has never been decided ; forgotten it 
may be, not decided. Two English gentlemen, it has been said, 
may be intimately acquainted for years, and yet never know each 
other's rehgious belief. The probability is they never knew it 
themselves. 

If instead of yielding to the business, our youth yields unfor- 
tunately to the pleasures of life, and becomes a libertine, it is 
possible that the sort of half faith he retains may even render 
him a weaker and more vicious, as it will certainly render him a 
more miserable man, than if he had been left from the commence- 
ment to the mere teaching of moral prudence. For he has an old 
enemy whom he calls Superstition, and whom, in his jovial hours, 
he defies and derides. In the hours of lassitude and disgust this 
old enemy steals back upon him, — returns in the shape of a re- 
morse ineffectual to reform, but powerful enough to disturb. 
Repose is denied to him ; a calm hour of reflection has become 
impossible to him ; and he recurs to a ruinous pleasure, not only 
for its own sake, but as an escape from himself. Mere terrestrial 
morality has this in her teaching, that she is at all times ready to 



A MENTAL COXFLICT. 195 

receive back her penitent. Her prudent counsels, and her lim- 
ited rewards, are still repeated as calmly, still offered as freely as 
at first. If her pupil has riotously wasted his share of Nature's 
bounty, she still holds forth what poor residue remains to tempt 
him back to wiser courses. A half-extinguished creed wakes up 
its smouldering fires at the approach of the renegade, and scares 
him back to what is still oblivion, if it has ceased to be enjoy- 
ment. 

But if neither the occupations nor the pleasures of life step in 
with their counterbalancing attractions, there may ensue a state 
of religious doubt, which it would be too painful to describe, and 
to which no certain term can be assigned. It is a mental anguish 
sustained and perpetuated by ever-shifting views, now tending to 
faith, and now to denial. It has no alternative of fervour and of 
hope, such as the religious man is familiar with who broods at 
times over his own frailty and unworthiness. It alternates only 
from perplexity to perplexity ; from fear to the defiance of fear. 
It may be nothing less than the blight of a whole existence. 
When I have heard men enumerate the evils of our imperfect 
state, when they have summed up the several items in the ac- 
count, as war and disease, corroding cares, incessant rancours, 
poverty, and all the widespread anxieties and animosities that 
our commerce generates, I have thought that I could still add 
one other evil to the list, which, in point of intensity of suffering, 
may surpass them all, — this of religious doubt. 

With some few men this gloomy contest, carried on apart and 
alone, has absorbed all the energies of their intellect. Coerced 
into silence, they gain no help from other minds ; the cloud 
hangs over them perpetually ; no w^ord from another disperses it 
for a moment : perhaps they are ashamed to confess the secret 
terrors they more than occasionally feel. They seek no distrac- 
tion ; for them there is no oblivion ; they must front their enemy 
with a steady eye, or they sink vanquished, and lose entirely 
their own self-respect. Perhaps there is no interest or pleasure 
so absorbing as to shelter them during one whole day from some 
recurrence of their sad and interminable controversy. They live 
on, knowing nothing of philosophy but its doubts, and retaining 
nothing of religion but its fears. 



196 BOOK III.— CHAPTER III. 

Such a one, when I knew him, was Cyril. A youth of more 
blameless manners there could not be. His parents were distin- 
guished for their evangelical piety, and were delighted to watch 
the development of his ardent and unaffected devotion. His 
nature had entirely responded to the religious training he had 
received. How came doubt, it will be asked, in such a mind ? 
What skeptical works was he likely to read ? And if he had 
been persuaded to read any such works, would they have pro- 
duced any other impression on a person of this description than 
pain and offence ? Let their statements or reasonings be what 
they might, such a person would only have been stung, irritated, 
wounded by them, — not convinced or shaken. 

JBut the enemy may approach in a far more insidious manner 
than by a direct attack. His father took a great interest in the 
subject of Reformatory Punishment, as it is sometimes called. 
(The combination of reformatory and educational measures loith 
Punishment, would be a more accurate expression for the object 
which such philanthropists have in view.) Schemes of prison 
discipline formed the most frequent topic of conversation at his 
own home. The house was full of books treating upon this sub- 
ject in every possible manner, either investigating the Rationale 
of Punishment, or proposing new methods for the moral restora- 
tion of the criminal. In short, it was the paternal hohhy. Now 
in works treating on the subject of criminal jurisprudence, there 
will invariably be intermingled ethical discussions on the nature 
and objects of Punishment itself, and on the .meaning which is to 
be attached to such words, for instance, as Retributive Punish- 
ment, and of Penalty, when imposed in order to secure obedience 
to a promulgated law. As I understood him, the perusal of these 
books, together with the constant reiteration in the family circle 
that the reformation of the criminal himself was never to be lost 
sight of as one of the ends of punishment, forced upon his mind 
the perception of a strange contrast between the ethical prin- 
ciples which his father advocated when discoursing upon this 
favourite topic, and the ethical principles which he advanced or 
implied when he expounded his Calvinistic divinity. Cyril, at 
least, could not reconcile the two. He could not help saying to 
himself — though he recoiled at first with horror from his own 



A MENTAL CONFLICT. 197 

suggestions — that his father claimed for a human legislator, prin- 
ciples more noble and enlightened than those he attributed to 
the Divine Governor. The idea was at first repudiated ; it was 
thrust back ; but it would return. The subject was not allowed 
to sleep, for every fresh visitor at the house called forth from his 
father an exposition of what he deemed to be the true principles 
of criminal jurisprudence. To punish for revenge, he pro- 
nounced unchristian and irrational ; he admitted no ends for 
punishment but the protection of society and the reformation of 
the criminal, which also was the best protection for society ; nor 
would he allow that the first of these was an end which could be 
legitimately pursued without being coupled with the second. 



That the future punishments of God should have for one end 
the reformation of the offender, does not appear to be a heresy 
of a very deep dye, nor one that ought to have disturbed a pious 
mind ; but it shook the whole system of theology in which Cyril 
had been brought up. If punishment has in itself wise and 
merciful ends, — if it is conducive, or accompanied by measures 
that are conducive, to the restoration of the criminal, what be- 
comes of all those ideas attached to the word Salvation, in which 
he had been educated? — I only indicate the train of thought 
awakened in Cyril's mind. Those only who have been educated 
as he was, can understand the terror and anguish of heart which 
such a train of thought brought with it. 



The first murmur of dissent he ventured to raise against the 
system in which he had been educated, was on the doctrine of 
Eternal Punishment. It was the doctrine he most frequently 
discussed with me. The more he studied it, whether in works 
of ethics or works of religion, the less could he assent to it. Yet 
the denial of it shook all the rest of the system ; his doctrine of 
Atonement must be entirely remodelled j in short, he was 
plunged into the miseries of doubt. 



198 BOOK III.— CHAPTER m. 

I became acquainted with Cyril — as I formed the rest of the 
few acquaintances I made at Oxford — by meeting him at Lux- 
more's rooms. The two men were not very congenial. In one 
respect there could not be a stronger contrast. Poor Cyril was 
tormented every hour of his life by the anxious question, What 
he was to believe ? On right belief must depend his future 
safety. My poet, where he could not see the truth, left the truth 
with God — left it with confidence there. Cyril had the terrible 
responsibility thrown on him, at his own peril, to see the truth 
himself. You would say that the one felt this responsibility too 
much, the other too little. 

Luxmore was interested with Cyril at first, but soon wearied 
of him ; and Cyril, for his part, could not understand, and was 
not a little scandalized at the perfect tranquillity with which the 
poet would admit, on some most momentous subjects, his pro- 
found ignorance. As I had manifested more sympathy M'ith 
him, and certainly more patience, Cyril transferred his confi- 
dence to me. I could not refuse him what poor comfort there 
might be in talking over his difficulties and affliction : but I con- 
fess that I also grew very weary of a companion who constantly 
recurred to the same querulous and painful subject of conversa- 
tion. It was with a feeling of dismay that I, at length, heard 
his low tap at my door. But he was of so gentle a nature, and 
so thoroughly good, that I could never find in my heart to receive 
him otherwise than cordially. 

Shy, meditative, and yet of ardent temperament, Cyril was 
one of those who know no half friendships. He must either pass 
you without revealing himself at all — cased in impenetrable re- 
serve — or he must o]3en his whole nature to you, and let you see 
every wound and every weakness. Men of such quick suscepti- 
bilities seek, with a sort of feminine instinct, to lay their heads 
on the shoulder of some one who stands firmer than themselves. 
I certainly was not that pillar of wisdom he should have chosen ; 
but as he had selected me as a sort of Mentor — as one calmer at 
least, if not wiser, than himself — it was surprising what an air of 
moderation and serenity I assumed. I smile to myself when I 
recall how readily I adopted the character assigned to me. How 



A MENTAL CONFLICT. 199 

cautious and discreet I became ! How fixed and stable, that I 
might give stability to another ! 



I remember him one day bringing to me, in a quite breathless 
state of excitement, a work of Dr. Chalmers. It was his Bridge- 
water Treatise. The Doctor argues there (as many others have 
done) for the great doctrine of Immortality, on the ground that 
there are spiritual faculties in man, which, in his present condi- 
tion, are but partially developed, and which, in fact, are but par- 
tially adapted to his present condition. Everything, he says, tends 
to prove a future state, in which such faculties will have their full 
development, both from the advance of the human being himself, 
and from the higher world in which, and by which, these faculties 
will be exercised. This argument he illustrated by the condi- 
tion of the child whilst yet in the womb, and quoting a descrip- 
tion of the foetal state from some medical authority (in which the 
adaptation of the foetus for a yet higher stage of existence than 
it then occupies, is set forth and ingeniously applied to this very 
subject) — Dr. Chalmers concludes with these words : " Such are 
the prognostics of a future destination that might be collected 
from the state of the fcetus ; and similar prognostics of a destina- 
tion still future might be collected from present appearances in 
the life and condition of man." 

Cyril brought me the book, with his finger on this passage, 
and pointing it out to me, with an air of troubled triumph in his 
countenance, he said, — " I believe it ! It is most true that, so far 
as our spiritual life is concerned, we are here in a sort of foetal 
condition. The analogy is permissible. But, good Heaven ! am 
I also to believe — what Dr. Chalmers and his Church will pro- 
ceed to tell me — that the conduct of this spiritual fcetus is to 
determine for ever the condition of that higher being who is to be 
born into some higher world ! I have a greater reverence for 
Dr. Chalmers than for any living man ; but how am I to recon- 
cile the argument in his book with what he and all his Church 
teach in the pulpit ? He argues here for our immortality on the 
grou.nd that we have faculties for a higher and more spiritual 



200 BOOK III.— CHAPTER III. 

life than can be here fully developed. I admit the fact ; I con- 
stantly maintain it ; of nothing am I more thoroughly persuaded. 
Oh ! what to me would be this earthly existence if I did not be- 
lieve that it would usher me into another, where the knowledge, 
and worship, and love of God shall fill my whole soul ! But 
how can I, or any man, use this argument for our immortality, 
and at the same time maintain that this life, where our spiritual 
powers are thus scantily developed, shall be the only trial-scene 
for determining the eternal condition of that other life, ^vhere our 
powers will be thus exalted ? Is the status of a man in the 
eternal life to be wholly and irredeemably determined by his 
conduct in this mortal life, in which it is confessed that the very 
faculties peculiarly appropriate to that eternal life are but imper- 
fectly developed, and cannot be fully exercised ? 

" We say, indeed, with truth, that the man grows out of the 
boy, and each subsequent stage of existence must be influenced 
by its predecessor. But, on the other hand, if the subsequent 
stage brings with it new powers, it cannot be wholly determined 
by the state that preceded. The man does in fact recover from 
the faults of the boy. And most certainly you would not judi- 
cially determine that the conduct of the boy should forever decide 
the condition of the man. In like manner, how can any one assert 
that the Immortal is to suffer eternally, without possibility of 
recovering himself from the conduct of the Mortal ? Are higher 
faculties to be given for no other purpose than to feel greater 
pain, and anguish, and remorse than the sinner could have done 
in the state in which he sinned ? 

" I cannot be wrong ! " he exclaimed ; " it is as clear as any 
demonstration in Euclid. And yet" — (his tone of triumph 
changing suddenly to one of anxiety and distress) — " I dare not 
say that I am right. How can I separate myself from such men 
as Chalmers, and forego the hopes of the Christian Church, and 
that sweet community of faith in which I have lived ? If this 
present life does not decide the destiny of the future life, the 
whole system of Divine truth in which I have hitherto believed 
crumbles to the dust." 



A MENTAL CONFLICT. 201 

To appreciate the distress of Cyril, it must be borne in mind 
that he had been brought up in the conviction that unbelief was 
a sin of the greatest magnitude — that it could not fail to incur 
all the penalties of extreme guilt, as the unbeliever was cut off 
from the only means of salvation. Say that he ivas wrong^ then 
his very denial had sentenced him directly or indirectly to that 
final doom he called in question. His unbelief had incapaci- 
tated him from seizing upon the sole means of escape. This 
terrible responsibility was for ever with him. A voice would 
peal incessantly in his ears — " You may be wrong, and then" • 

He has confessed to me, with burning blushes on his cheek, 
that the sight of an open grave, newly dug in the earth for the 
reception of that dead body — the like to which he too must soon 
become — has filled him with a secret terror and consternation. 
He had perhaps met such an object in his morning's ramble ; he 
had approached to the brink ; he had looked down into that 
dark, steep rectangular pit, significant of so much. There it lay 
as the sexton had just left it, ready for some defunct brother on 
whom it would close for ever ; there it lay, black and unsightly 
in the broad sunshine. He thought it cowardice to flinch from 
looking down into it ; but he brought home with him an image 
which haunted him throughout the day. And in the dead of 
night, when there was no busy world, and no broad sunshine to 
compete with the vision, he would find himself standing alone 
by that open grave. 



Other theological difficulties, no doubt, occurred to him, now 
impelled unwillingly along the path of hazardous inquiry, but 
our conversation generally revolved on this subject of eternal" 
or retributive punishment. There may be two theories, he 
would say, about the sentiment of justice ; but you cannot have 
two conflicting ideas of tlie just, so as to have one justice for 
jurisprudence, and another justice for theology. 

" But they toss me," he would exclaim, " from the idea of a 
judge and a judicial sentence to that of an offended Deity, whose 
infinite anger is roused against sin. If I ask for explanation of 
the justice of the sentence, I am told that we cannot measure 

9* 



202 BOOK III.— CHAPTER III. 

God's righteous anger. If I ask for explanation of this anger, 
I am told that it is just, and that man deserves whatever punish- 
ment it inflicts. Surely the penalty imposed upon the offender 
is like every other part of the Divine economy, the dictate of an 
eternal and immutable wisdom. Surely it was from the begin- 
ning, and ever must be, such a penalty as is in perfect harmony 
with the good of the w^iole of His creation. For me, I can sub- 
mit — submit with the resignation of a child — to whatever pun- 
ishment a Divine wisdom has appointed, for I am confident that 
it has been appointed, like all other things and events in crea- 
tion, for the good of each and all." 



Cyril had not failed to pursue his subject into those meta- 
physical discussions upon the nature of the conscience and the 
moral sentiment, with which it is mingled up. He had been 
told by some who had a reputation for profound thought, that he 
should find the answer to his ditficulties in a more abstruse sys- 
tem of metaphysics than that which Locke teaches, or Paley 
implies. It was with sincere desire to find relief for his per- 
plexities that he applied himself to writers who have a credit 
for greater profundity. Especially he laboured to understand 
the exposition (followed or appealed to by many English 
writers) which Kant gives of the Conscience or of the sense 
•of Duty. 

But from this quarter he got no aid. The conscience may be 
precisely what Kant describes it to be ; but though it may give 
us an intuitive knowledge of right and v/rong, it does not give 
us an intuitive knowledge that we shall be punished if we do 
wrong. And it is this last which Cyril had to seek for. So fin- 
as he could understand the matter, it was the belief in future 
punishments that educated the conscience on this particular ; not 
the conscience that gave us belief in future punishments. 

Say with Kant that there are in our nature two voices, neither 
of which admit of any explanation — both self-authoritative. The 
one is, " Seek your happiness ; " the other is, " Do your duty." 
But " do your duty " does not directly imply that you will be 
punished if you do not. For if it did, it would instantly become 



A MENTAL CONFLICT. 203 

one with that other voice, " Seek your happiness." It would 
have lost (in the very moment of its birth) that self-authorita- 
tive, absolute character which had been assigned to it. The 
sublime imperative sense of Duty would be reduced instantly to 
a calculation of our own interests. Cyril did not presume, he 
said, to pass judgment on the metaphysics of Kant, or of others 
who have given this account of the moral sentiment. He limited 
himself to the safe and indisputable proposition, that this stoical 
theory of morals gave to the sentiment of Duty a final and abso- 
lute character, and could afford no peculiar assistance to those 
who have to discuss the doctrine of future rewards and punish- 
ments. It leaves our knowledge of these rewards and punish- 
ments to be gathered from quite other sources. You are to do 
your duty independently of these. 

" Do not," Cyril would add, " confound disapprobation Math 
punishment. The good man must always disapprove — the high- 
est type of stoical wisdom must always, without mitigation, dis- 
approve — of vice and crime. But when and how the ideal good 
or wise man shall punish, depends on many considerations. 
Least of all does he punish all criminals alike, and without any 
regard to their own possible amendment." 



I cannot describe, and do not wish to describe, the depth of 
terror and affliction which Cyril felt as his earliest faith was 
being rent from him. A soul athirst for piety seemed driven 
from the only Temple in which it could worship. He grew 
restless, gloomy, at times even morose. 

It became very difficult to converse with him. If I assented 
to any of his new views, he recoiled from my assent ; he was 
afraid to find himself right. He immediately began to quarrel 
with the terms of my assent. If I controverted his skepticism, 
he became vehement and angry, railed at the hypocrisy of the 
intellectual classes, and overwhelmed me wdth eloquent tirades 
on the love of truth. Some philosophers there were, he said, 
who delighted to show that nothing could be proved ; there were 
others who delighted to use their philosophy, and knowledge, 
and ingenuity in showing that nothing could be disproved ; that 



204 BOOK III.— CHAPTER III. 

what seems most absurd to the man of common sense may yet, 
from a certain point of view, wear a perfectly rational aspect. 
Amongst this latter class he would sometimes rank me. 

The cloud was darkening over him. At length he rarely 
came to my rooms. Hearing he was unwell, I went to see him. 
I asked him after his health ; he did not answer the question — 
took no heed of it ; his thoughts were elsewhere. " Oh, Thorn- 
dale ! " he said, " to pass long sleepless nights — sleepless and in 
pain — and not to know how to pray!^^ And as he pressed my 
hand he burst into an agony of tears. He had my most sincere 
sympathy ; but how distressingly powerless did I feel in my 
attempt to relieve him ! 

Soon after this I quitted Oxford, nor did I see Cyril again till 
I accidentally met him on the sea-coast at Wales. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INTERVIEW AT BARMOUTH. 

I WAS at Dolgelly in Wales, when, accidentally hearing that 
Cyril was passing his time alone at the neighbouring watering- 
place of Barmouth, I rode over to see him. 

It was evening when I reached his lodgings. He was absent, 
but I had not sat long at the window of his apartment before I 
saw him toiling up the steep ascent that led to it. He had just 
come off the water, and wore, as I had occasion to remember, a 
rough pilot-coat. I observed in him, as he walked slowly towards 
me, an air of greater lassitude and distress than the fatiguing 
ascent on which Barmouth stands could account for ; but this 
expression was dissipated the moment he perceived me. His 
step quickened, his countenance lighted up with joy. Never 
have I been greeted with so cordial a welcome. One would say 
that I had brought health as well as joy at once into his solitary 
lodging. He told me, speaking very quickly all the time, that 
he had just returned from a long day's sail. He, with a man 
and a boy to manage the boat, had sailed out he said, " due west 
— Columbus fashion — to discover new worlds ; but thinking it 
prudent to return before night-time, such discoveries had been 
postponed to a future time." A bolder voyage, he said, or a 
longer one, he, a mere landsman, had never undertaken ; and 
then to meet with an old friend on his return ! And again he 
grasped me by the hand, greeting me with an excitement I could 
not quite comprehend. 

We sat down to our supper. He was in excellent spirits. 
When well, and free from his overhanging care, he had wit at 
command, but I had never known him before indulge in such 
sallies of mirth. I was congratulating him on this revival of his 



206 BOOK III.— CHAPTER IV. 

spirits, when something in the pocket of his pilot-coat, which he 
had continued to wear, apparently incommoded him, and he drew 
forth, and placed upon the table, what seemed the fluke of an 
old anchor, a mass of iron of no little weight or magnitude. 

I jestingly asked what could have induced him to collect and 
carry about so extraordinary a specimen of the treasures of the 
deep, or whether he had not brought home by mistake the ballast 
of the boat in his pocket. But I received no answer. The 
production of this ponderous curiosity had suddenly changed the 
whole demeanour of the man. A disturbed and melancholy air 
had taken possession of his countenance. He had put down the 
mass of iron on the table, and was gazing on it intently. The 
next moment, hiding his face in his hands, he had thrown him- 
self across it, bursting into tears. 

I was struck dumb ; I knew not what to say, nor which way 
to look ; I could understand nothing of all this passion, and hesi- 
tated whether to ask for an explanation. When, however, he 
had somewhat recovered himself, he freely gave me one. 

"How this,'' he said, pointing to the fluke of the anchor, 
" could have been left in my coat-pocket, or how I could have 
drawn it forth, forgetting for a moment why I had placed it 
there, seems to me incomprehensible. But you shall now hear 
all. Indeed I must have told you. O Thorndale ! I came down 
here, to this remote place — will you believe it ? — I came here, to 
this beautiful sea, to plunge myself in its depths — to lie, a dead 
and senseless thing, among its weeds and rocks. How miserable 
I have been, need I tell you after this ? O God ! it was but an 
hour ago that this horrible design was frustrated ; and already I 
can hardly beheve that I was the madman who had resolved 
on it." 

He paused ; his own emotions overcame him. For myself, I 
was as much astonished as grieved at what he had told me. I 
should have thought that the religious feelings with which I knew 
him to be so thoroughly penetrated — that even his fear of death 
— would have withheld him from su'cli a project. But it was 
this very fear of death, and his agony of doubt, that had made 
life miserable to him — so miserable, that it seemed he could no 
longer endure it. Mere despair, and the rack of conflicting 
thoughts, had led him to his rash purpose. 



THE INTERVIEW AT BARMOUTH. 207 

Cyril divined the tenor of my thoughts. " You are surprised," 
he said, when he resumed his account, " that I should have ever 
formed so desperate and criminal a resolution. I am surprised 
myself. And yet it was slowly formed ; and it gained its strength 
in this and that hour of silent and irrepressible agony. This 
fear of death, I have said to myself, which haunts me perpetually, 
is it not a part of life ? — with me so interwoven with my life, 
that I shall never escape from it but by throwing off existence 
altogether. Unreal terrors ! I believe them not ; but I cannot 
kill these shadows — they come and go as they please. And what 
if they are indeed shadows of some dreadful reality ? Better 
know the worst. Better dash open at once these mysterious 
doors that lead out of life, and see what lies behind, than sit here 
trembling every moment at what they may disclose ; open some 
day they assuredly will. Strange thoughts, Thorndale, have been 
mine, and such perhaps as you will hardly credit. If it should 
be my fate — I have thus ruminated within myself — if it be my 
fate to look up to God from some wild infernal region full of 
pain, I will still and for ever look upwards with only love and 
reverence ! I shall then know that such is his will ; I shall 
then know that such a destiny, being a reality, must be in ac- 
cordance with his infinite wisdom. I will think no thought but 
that of resignation ; 1 will worship still. I shall be happier in 
hell, whatever hell may be, with resignation at my heart, than 
here on earth, with this agony of doubt for ever on my soul." 



" Pain," he continued, " or any ordinary grief, as the wasting 
of disease, I could have borne, I think — borne as patiently as 
others bear them. I could have been content to live on, without 
anything of what men call pleasure ; or to have resigned my 
being altogether — to have breathed a while beneath the sky, 
then lapsed into the natural quiet of the grave. But that 
natural quiet of the grave it was not permitted me to expect. 
Imagination has reanimated the dead thing there — reanimated 
for some unconsuming torture. That soft, mute, inoffensive 
worm, which feeds on the senseless ruin of our flesh, Imagina- 
tion has transformed into some worm that dieth not, preying in- 



208 BOOK III.— CHAPTER IV. 

cessantly — on I know not what — something most capable of pain, 
and incapable of extinction. But if yon suspect all this to be 
imagination — if you do not believe it — you will say, why this 
terror ? O Thorndale ! if I did believe it, I should soon cease 
to fear ; my whole soul would be absorbed in the great work of 
salvation." 

" My dear Cyril," I could not help interposing, " one would 
think, whilst listening to all these sad confessions, that you had 
some terrible guilt upon your conscience. What crime have you 
committed? what unlawful pleasure have you ever sought? Let 
your own conscience utter its strictest sentence ; what so dreadful 
thing have you to fear ? " 

" Our own conscience ! " he replied. " What loose talk is this ! 
How measure out God's judgments by the individual conscience, 
when it is known to all of us that the good and pious are precisely 
those who condemn themselves most strictly and severely, while 
the hardened villain, free enough in condemning others, gener- 
ally contrives to acquit himself? Moralists and philosophical 
lecturers, playing with their subject quite at their ease, tell men 
to act up to the dictates of their conscience, and to live at peace 
with God. Poor guidance ! Our conscience gives back to us 
what it has learnt, and we must always ask ourselves ivhat has 
taught, or should teach, the conscience f Since I have been here, 
whilst wandering 'about this very neighbourhood, I have talked 
with men who, being uninstructed, are as fearless as any beast of 
the field of any after-life. I envied them ! 

" For me," he wildly exclaimed, " show me the blackest 
criminal on earth ; I could absolve him from the terrors I can- 
not defy for myself. Yes ! And I have lived blameless as a child 
— I have lived only in study and meditation. Study and medi- 
tation ! Headlong passion, sin and its remorse, would have 
guided me into a better haven ; but, my dear Thorndale, I shall 
never, if I diverge into discussions like these, get through the 
brief and miserable history of this morning." 



He proceeded thus with his narrative : — " There are some dear 
relatives of mine to whom my death would be nothing so painful 



THE INTERVIEW AT BARMOUTH. 209 

as the knowledge that I had sought it voluntarily. This pain I 
wished to spare them. It was my object, therefore, to accom- 
phsh my design in such a manner that my death should appear 
the effect of accident. 

" I told you that I sailed this morning some distance out to 
sea, and you see this tell-tale iron. It was my purpose to fall, 
as if by accident, out of the boat. I had some days ago, picked 
up upon the beach this fragment of an old anchor ; and the 
thought occurred to me that it might serve once more, and for 
the last time, for another sort of anchorage. With this in my 
pocket, I was shotted for a sailor's grave. The deep sea would 
for ever keep the secret. I should sink, and there would be no 
opportunity for any effort on the part of the sailors to save, or 
on the part of the poor swimmer, prompted by his own natural 
instincts, to escape from death. 

" When we had sailed out as far as was practicable, and were 
about to return, I rose from my seat, and took my stand near the 
head of the boat. I stood there, holding by some of the rigging. 
There is always a considerable motion in the vessel when it tacks. 
What more probable than that a young landsman, standing in the 
position I had chosen, should lose his balance and fall overboard ? 
I stood near the edge ; I swayed dizzily over those waves, so 
soon to be for me the waters of oblivion. The moment was 
come ! I had but to raise the fingers of one hand — to relax 
my hold upon a single rope — and those waters would be flowing 
over me. Were they, would they be indeed, the waters of ob- 
livion ? 

" No ! I felt that they were not. It was not only in that green 
sea that I was about to plunge ; and yet I should have madly 
plunged. But my accident had been even too well arranged. 
The sailors saw my peril ; one called on me to sit down while 
the boat tacked ; the other took me by the arm to guide me to 
my seat. The moment of action was lost. 

" Mechanically I regained my seat. You will ask why no 
second effort was made ; or perhaps you will be curious to know 
what thoughts occurred to me when I resumed my seat. I will 
teU you honestly. I fell back into a mere stupor. The mind, I 
suppose, strung to its utmost tension, suddenly gave way. I sat 



210 BOOK III.— CHAPTER IV. 

gazing on tlie waters in mere stupefaction ; it seemed impossible 
for me to think. I sat motionless, and without a thought, till the 
boat knocked against the shore. 

" Judge what I feU when, returning in this desolate mood to 
my solitary lodging, I found you here. To be greeted at that 
moment by a friendly voice, was almost more than I could bear. 
I wonder that I could sustain myself at all, and that those tears 
which have since betrayed me did not break forth at once. Oh 
Thorndale ! we talk of angels from heaven, sent down to minister 
to us ; and I suppose we do not talk altogether unwisely ; but 
there are times when the fellow-man who puts his hand in ours 
is more to us than the anael could be." 



When Cyril had concluded his sad narrative, I did not venture 
to make any comments on it : I merely repeated my sincere con- 
gratulation on the frustration of his design, and on his own sub- 
sequent abandonment of it. My sole endeavour was to allay his 
present agitation. I quietly removed out of sight that huge piece 
of iron which had brought forward this painful revelation, and 
strove gradually to lead him back to some of those topics we 
were discussing before it made its ominous appearance. But 
this was no easy task ; it was, in fact, impossible. The old chord 
had been struck, and it continued to vibrate. 

" You congratulate me," he said, " on my escape, and you say 
truly that the design has been abandoned. It will never again 
be renewed. Already it seems as remote from me as if fifty 
years had intervened. But to what life is it I am restored. Will 
peace of mind be ever mine ? Oh, very gentle, tender, and 
thrilling are the first approaches of religious fear ! It is the 
mother teaches. And what are future worlds, what is eternity, 
to the child's imagination ? Will not she be there also to shield 
and protect ? Standing at the mother's knee, how sweet is the 
solemn awe with which we look upwards and around, seeking 
the mysterious Power in every shadow that appears ! But this 
fear, so gently taught, grows and expands with the expanding 
intellect, and with the wider range of the universe thrown open 
to the man. At length one dark terror fills eternity. The child's 
fear — the shadow on the wall — has grown to this ! 



THE INTERVIEW AT BARMOUTH. 211 

" Will peace of mind be ever mine ? I dare not court distrac- 
tion ; only in the toil of inquiry do I find a certain repose. 
Pleasure I shall never seek. Beneath the first flower I stooped 
to touch, I should hear the hiss of the serpent. There might be 
guilt in it, and no man shall ever say of me that I sacrificed my 
faith for any of the baser joys of this life. Strange and per- 
plexed condition ! I feel that if I were to live a fasting monk, 
I should after all my penance, die in doubt ; that if I were to be 
surrounded by all the temptations of the voluptuary, I should, 
with all my skepticism, live a monk. But I weary you — I will 
forbear." 

He did not forbear, however, but proceeded in the same sad 
and distressful strain far into the night. 

I tried to persuade him that, having the love of God, and good- 
ness in his heart, he had the essential elements for a pious life. 
" Live well," I said ; " you will live out these doubts. Live 
well ! you will live into whatever higher truths are attainable 
by man." 

" There is hut one name given under heaven whereby men shall 
he saved r^ I heard him mutter these words to himself. Then 
aloud to me he said, "You have dwelt too much, Thorndale, 
amongst the abstractions of philosophy to know the anguish of 
mind that I have felt, and shall always feel. 

"And amidst all this misery of my own," he continued, "I am 
quoted by my family and friends as a monster of impiety and 
guilt. I am frowned upon, avoided, expostulated with, and pious 
ministers reprove me — for intellectual pride ! They ask me 
tauntingly if philosophy can satisfy ? As if I ever vaunted of 
philosophy, and the satisfaction it could give ! Others solemnly 
abjure me not to trouble the faith of others. I am silent; I trou- 
ble no man's faith. Might I not retort that their faith has trou- 
bled me ? And this enforced silence robs me of half my strength." 



At length we separated. The next morning we were to have 
breakfasted together. I went to his lodging, — he was gone. He 
had packed up his portmanteau in the night, the landlady told 



212 BOOK III.— CHAPTER IV. 

me, and departed with the break of day. Not a message, not a 
scrap of paper was left for me. He was gone ; nor did I ever 
see him or hear of him again till I met him in the habit of a Cis- 
tercian monk. That eventful day, I presume, had been the crisis 
of his disorder ; and he had betaken himself to some new scene, 
and perhaps more propitious society, for the cultivation of hap- 
pier trains of thought. 

How all this flashed upon my mind as I saw him the other day 
in the cell of his monastery ! The little room at Barmouth rose 
distinctly before me ; I sat again at that table fi'om which the 
supper had been removed, and on which there lay between us 
that huge piece of iron ! 



CHAPTER V. 

VISITS FROM THE CISTERCIAN. 

I WAS pleased this morning to see the Cistercian — my former 
Cyril — steal quietly up to my terrace here, and enter my parlour 
with his pax vohiscum. 

It was the first time, he said, since taking the habit, that he 
had entered any walls but those of the monastery, except on 
some mission of charity. " I do not think," he added with a 
smile, " that you are likely to seduce me back into the world, for 
you live here, I understand, a perfect recluse yourself. Is it 
well to live so entirely alone ? " 

" Not well, certainly, to live alone ." 

" No, nor to die alone," he replied. " I speak, however, only 
for myself; I had ever a love of seclusion, and a fear of solitude." 



I have not received any precise account of the process by which 
Cyril became transformed to the faithful Catholic he now is. Nor 
am I very solicitous to learn. The reaction having once taken 
place, I can understand that appetite for belief which comes back 
and grows upon us. The only sentiment I can feel is that of sin- 
cere congratulation on the peace and happiness he has obtained. 
How changed from when I last saw him in England ! No tem- 
pest of the sea, and no returning calm, could present a stronger 
contrast. 

It would be idle to ask why he could not have secured the 
same rest by simply going back to his early form of faith. Thou- 
sands obtain in that Protestant and Calvinistic faith all the relig- 
ious peace and fervour which a monastery ever bestowed, or ever 
received and sheltered. I suppose that he could not go directly 



214 BOOK III.— CHAPTER V. 

back, — the road seemed that way barred ; let us rejoice that he 
found some other road, though, to our apprehension, a more diffi- 
cult one. 

The doctrine of Purgatory, no doubt, favourably distinguished, 
in his regard, the Old Church from the New. I was a little curi- 
ous to discover how he had solved for himself that problem which 
beyond all others had disquieted his mind, — the nature of future 
punishments. Solution, I suspect, of such problems, we learn 
gradually to dispense with. Cyril expresses himself occasionally 
with due orthodox severity, and yet I am not displeased to notice 
a certain amiable inconsistency, drawing him farther to the side 
of mercy than even his present Church would warrant. 



^^ All religion hangs on the belief in God's righteous anger 
against sin. Once quibble that away, and you may be Deist, 
Pantheist, Atheist, — what you will — it matters little." 

Cyril repeated these words very emphatically, as if he wished 
me to understand that they contained the chief result of his own 
bitter experience. 



Afterwards, when touching upon the article of Purgatory, he 
said, "A salvation after this world has been left, I, as a Protest- 
ant, always desired to hope. But the Protestant creed did not 
permit such a hope. How often did I lay myself down to sleep 
with a sense of guilt upon my mind, and rise up in the morning 
with the same sense of a burden on my conscience, because I 
was striving to believe what I now hold with the most pious and 
happy conviction, — the undying love and mercy of God. 

" Not but that our Church," he continued (anxious lest he 
should become too lenient in his interpretation of her tenets), 
"retains, and must ever retain, that more awful doctrine which 
stands alone in yours. An infinite terror there must always be 
in the armoury of the Church. Very charitable it might seem 
to marshal the unthinking crowd in some holiday procession, and, 
heading it along the broad highway of life, declare that this is 



VISITS FEOM THE CISTERCIAN. 215 

the road to heaven. It is not. The little tiock of Christ are 
oftenest driven through the sharp, and steep, and narrow defiles : 
they bleed, they faint, but they are lodged safe at last." 

He said at another time, " Even Infinite Love and Infinite 
Compassion must strike a guilty race with terror and remorse. 
This transgressing world, since the day of its sin, has seen, and 
could see, nothing so awful as that mild Presence which walked 
forth from the village of Nazareth. Under that naked footfall 
the earth trembled, and it trembles still. 

" It trembles because it is impure. It rejoices as it throws off 
its impurity. If I told the sinner in his sins that he would one 
day, and through the intervention of that very Being, be a 
glorified saint, he could not believe it. The infinite terror of his 
guilt must come, and pass away before he could believe it. But," 
he added, speaking in a lower tone, as if it were some inner 
doctrine that he ventured to announce — " but I think it has been 
revealed to me that every soul that God has made shall finally 
be brought under the dominion of wisdom and of love. This I 
have at length authoritatively learnt in the stillness of my 
monastery, and in solitary walks by the sea-shore. If I were to 
say that Christ himself had taught it to me, you would smile at 
my enthusiasm ; yet something like this I feel to be the truth." 

It is ever thus : When we do not dare to think for ourselves 
in any other way, it is the spirit teaches. 



" Fear first," said the Cistercian, " then Hope is the impulse 
of a Christian life. Last of all, the Christian life itself i^ its own 
motive. There comes a time when neither Fear nor Hope are 
necessary to the pious man ; but he loves righteousness for 
righteousness' sake, and love is all in all. It is not joy at escape 
from future perdition that he now feels ; nor is it hope for some 
untold happiness in the future : it is a present rapture of piety, 
and resignation, and love ; a present that fills eternity. It asks 
nothing, it fears nothing ; it loves, and it has no petition to make. 
God takes back his little child unto himself — a little child that 
has no fear, and is all trust." 



216 BOOK III.— CHAPTER V. 

The last stage of Christian experience, as Cyril describes it, 
approximates very closely to what Clarence sometimes announces 
as the religion of Utopia. In both, religion is not pre-eminently 
the relation between this life and a future life, but, pre-eminently 
the relation felt between the soul and its Divine Creator. The 
mere duration we assign to the creature does not enter into the 
essence of the relationship. It begins here, and is further devel- 
oped in the hereafter. 



Cyril has been with me again. I must call him and think of 
him as Cyril. What his new and monastic name is, I have not 
inquired. Cyril must serve for me. 

This time our conversation ran on what must ever be a favour- 
ite topic with men of his class — the necessity of a revelation, and 
of an implicit obedience to it. Religion, according to Cyril, is 
founded upon Truths which are not deducible from any other 
known truths, and which have been, and perhaps continue to be, 
supernaturally revealed to the human mind. 

In tlie course of his conversation he referred to his own past 
experience in a manner that interested me very much. I shall 
just stnng together, without introducing my own part in the 
dialogue, my reminiscence of our morning talk. 

" Our first step in religion cannot be an act of the understand- 
ing ; for we are children before we are men. Our first belief is 
an obedience. 

" Nature you say, has so far settled the matter for us : a child 
must be taught most things by its parent in a dogmatic or authori- 
tative manner. Every father is in that sense a Priest — and a 
priest in science, and in history, and in every department of 
human knowledge, as well as in religion. 

" But here lies the dijflference between religion and all other 
subjects of human knowledge : The very evidence for its truth 
"lies in those inner experiences which can be known only to the 
religious mind. 

" It matters not, therefore, whether you are considering the 
child or the man. The first step in religion must be an implicit 
faith, an act of obedience. What the father is to the family, the 
Church is to the rest of mankind. 



VISITS FROM THE CISTERCIAN. 217 

" A Protestant tells his son to examine what he calls the 
* Evidences,' but sends him to the examination with the profound 
impression on his mind that it will be a most perilous business 
for him, if he comes to any but one conclusion. I do not quarrel 
with the parent for thus attempting to forestall the convictions of 
his son, but I say that it is a cruel inconsistency to set him on 
the task of examination at all — to tell him that it is his duty to 
inquire (which must be more or less to doubt), when his plain 
duty is to act and live steadfastly by the faith he already has. 
Religion brings its own evidences. ' Do my will, and ye shall 
know if it be of God.' The Protestant is familiar with that text 
— why does he not act faithfully on it ? The piety he cultivates 
in his child will reveal to him, as he grows up, living truths, to 
be learnt nowhere but in that piety. I do not forbid to this or 
that man, and certainly not to a learned priesthood, discussions 
on the historical evidences of Christianity, or on the coherence 
of its several dogmas. But I confidently assert that each Chris- 
tian man comes to know the truth of his rehgion by its fruits 
within his own soul. He, of course, then supports and teaches it 
from the conviction of his reason ; but this conviction of his 
reason grew up from an act of obedience — from an obedient faith. 
There is no other way in which a man can be inducted into that 
spiritual experience, into that communion with God, which be- 
comes afterwards the very reality on which his reason builds. 

" I shall be called a mystic," he continued, " but I fearlessly 
avow that my proof of the very existence of a God — of a God 
that can be made the object of religion, of prayer, of devotion — 
lies in my consciousness of a spiritual communion with Him. 
How not beheve in Him ? I beheve in Him as I believe in the 
human voice I hear. If the Divine voice does not fall upon my 
outward senses, I hear it in my soul. 

" But how could this spiritual communion commence but in an 
act of obedient faith ? 

" Our religious system is, so to speak, like our own beautiful 
satellite — a globe of light, perfect in itself, and revolving in per- 
fect harmony with the terrestrial globe ; it is not like an edifice 
built on the earth itself, the first step rising only just above the 
earth. 

10 



218 BOOK IIL-CHAPTER V. 

*' There are many who assert that Reason is, at all events, a 
necessary and sufficient authority for the first great article of 
religion. To my mind it is not so. Not necessary ; for we all 
believed in God before we could reason upon the subject : not 
sufficient; for let any man have effaced from his mind (by 
neglect of all spiritual communion) that idea of a personal God 
he had obtained from his parents or the Church, and he will find 
his reason alone insufficient for its reconstruction or its revival. 

" To me there is no spectacle more afflictive than that of a 
sincere and philosophic Deist. I see him busy with both hands 
moulding and setting firm upon its pedestal the Divine Image 
which he is the next moment to kneel down before. Not two 
days together does he pray precisely to the same God. He is 
framing his divine conception even while he is uttering his peti- 
tion. If a more ardent feeling steals over him, and carries him 
away from what is more a discussion than a worship, he owes it 
to a quite other source than his philosophy. Some chant from 
the people's church is heard softened by the distance ; it floats 
upon the air, and his soul floats on it, and fortunately he does 
not ask himself whence it came." 



" I need not tell you," Cyril said, " that I have passed through 
that state in which we have to reconstruct our piety by the efforts 
of our own reason. Fearful at one time of losing all the in- 
estimable benefits of a cultus, or habitual worship, I resolved to 
frame some simple ritual of my own. It was indeed a very sim- 
ple rubric that I devised. Upon a piece of ivory, about the size 
of half-a-crown, I wrote on the one side the single word ' God,' 
and on the other side the word 'Immortality,' God and Im- 
mortality ! Could I have chosen two words of greater signifi- 
cance ? Then, drawing a silken cord through a hole pierced in 
the ivory, I suspended this amulet about my neck. It lay con- 
cealed under the waistcoat. If at any time the silken cord 
should be visible, it would attract no peculiar attention. 

" It was my habit then, and perhaps is still, when alone and 
thoughtful, to thrust my hand into my bosom. On every such 
occasion I should touch the silken cord. I should be instantly 



VISITS FKOM THE CISTERCIAN. 219 

reminded of the words written on the ivory. This would direct 
mj contemplation. Besides which, every night I should have to 
remove, and every morning to replace, my sacred amulet, and 
I resolved never to do this without some moments of reflection 
being given to its two sublime inscriptions. This was my rosary, 
my church service, my matins, my chimes, my ceremonial to 
keep the spiritual part of me from quite dying out. Confess 
that it strictly accorded with the simplicity of the reason. 
Could Clarence himself have devised a more unexceptionable 
liturgy ? 

" For some brief time my modest ritual seemed to answer 
very well. Lofty subjects of thought, and exalted hopes and 
sentiments, were revived and sustained in my mind by the touch 
of the silken cord. But, unhappily, I was at this period specu- 
lative as well as pious, analytic as well as contemplative. ' Im- 
mortality ! ' I would sometimes say to myself, ' What is it to be 
immortal ? I aspire to be transformed into something higher than 
man — not merely to be perpetuated. If transformed, what be- 
comes of my identity or close connection with my own past ex- 
istence ? If no great essential change takes place in my very 
nature, how do I know that I am not committing the same egre- 
gious error in asking for immortality there, that I should most 
assuredly commit if I petitioned for it here ? — I will not recall 
the array of miserable objections that began to haunt me when 
I thought of this side of my medal. Reason was less and less 
acquiescent. One day I took my ivory, and with a firm and 
yet no irreverent hand, I drew my pen across the word 'Im- 
mortality,' and wrote instead the word ' Resignation.' 

" ' God and Resignation ! ' — this formula was surely unassail- 
able. But now the other uncancelled inscription began to call 
up interminable questionings. I never doubted of the existence 
of God, but I asked myself what conception I, judging by the 
mere reason, could form of Him. The touch of the silken cord 
became now the signal for still more painful and terrible per- 
plexities, and for a far more profound disquietude. ' How per- 
sonify the Infinite,' I said to myself. ' Does not the notion of 
personality itself imply contrast, limitation, and must not a 
person be therefore Finite? Or how personify at all, but by 



220 BOOK III.— CHAPTER V. 

borrowing from the creature, and framing an ideal out of human 
qualities ? ' 

"At one moment my conception of God seemed grand and 
distinct, and my whole soul was filled and satisfied with it. 
Suddenly. I was startled and abashed when I traced in it too 
plainly the features of humanity. Those I hastened to obliter- 
ate, and the whole image was then fading into terrible obscurity. 
I remember one day our common friend Luxmore saying, in his 
wnld poetic manner, that the ordinary imagination of God was 
but the shadow of a man thrown upwards — the image of our 
best and greatest — ' seen larger on the concave of the sky.' 
Conscious that there was some truth in this, I endeavoured all 
I could to refine and subtilize my conception of the Divine 
Beino-. God was not precisely the benevolent and the wise 
being, but the source of all benevolence and all wisdom. On 
every side my conception expanded into infinity ; on every side 
it was escaping out of the field of vision. 

" Have you never, when lying down at night, instead of fall- 
ing to sleep, fallen into a curious state, (the result, I suppose, of 
an over-exerted eye or brain,) in which some image, or succes- 
sion of images, Avill rise before you unbidden, and then gradually, 
in spite of any effort to detain them, rise and melt into the air. 
In such a state I can remember once to have seen a gigantic 
sculptured head, like that of the Jupiter in the Vatican, appear 
before me, as if on some cloudy pedestal. There it stood, dis- 
tinct and most subhme. But even as I looked at it, and just 
because I looked intently at it, this grand head, upon its cloudy 
pillar, rose, vanishing into air as it ascended. The moment 
after I saw it again in its former position and distinctness, and 
again it rose upward, seeming to ride on that very motion of the 
eye, which was nevertheless following it. I found it impossible 
to arrest the image or this upward motion of the eye ; and it 
again rose dissolving into thin air. It is but a feeble illustra- 
tion ; but in this same way my grand conception of the Deity 
would appear, and even whilst, and because, I looked intently, it 
would rise and vanish in the infinite space. Yet, when I looked 
again, lo ! it had resumed its place in all its original power and 
majesty. 



VISITS FROM THE CISTERCIAN. 221 

" One day, in my rambles, as I sat down by onr river Isis — 
(I can see the very spot before me now, and the sluirgish barge 
that passed me at the time, and the miserable horse on the 
towing-path, and the bargeman standing by the funnel of his 
cabin, the very image of stolidity and content) — one day as I sat 
ruminating on these themes which the ivory amulet had called 
up, I felt, once for all, that the reason was utterly unequal to 
the task I had imposed on it. That silken cord, slight as it was, 
seemed to be strangling me. I drew it from my neck. I took 
my ivory amulet in both my hands, and snapt it in two. I threw 
the pieces into the running river. Thus ended my cultus, or 
ritual according to the pure reason. 

" No ! no ! Thorndale, it is quite true that contemplation of 
God is the highest religion ; but the sentiment, to be complete, 
requires the consciousness that God also contemplates you, 
personally, with approbation, with love, not anger. Without 
this addition — which you will not get out of your philosophy — 
the contemplation of God has little more religion in it than the 
contemplation of nature. It is nothing but the contempla- 
tion of the universe seen as the idea of the creator — a grand 
subject of meditation, but not in itself religion any more than 
the contemplation of the universe is religion." 



I have stated Cyril's Catholic views in as simple and philo- 
sophical a manner as I could. Whatever may be decided upon 
the philosophy of his views, I am sure his life is most happily 
chosen. 

At this moment if I could change positions with any one, it 
would be with Cyril. 

That story of the ivory amulet reminded me of some passages 
in my own life. How often have I wished — how intensely do 
I long at this present moment — for some cultus, some worship, 
some mode of devotion in which the heart can go forth to its 
God ! Prayer, in its highest significance, is not petition : the 
petitionary form merely expresses desires which are themselves 
the very life of devotion,— trust, dependence, hope. 



222 BOOK III.— CHAPTER V. 

I suppose we all feel thus in any calm reflective hour. At 
least if we have ever felt this longing for devotion at any time 
of our lives, it will never cease occasionally to return. 

I remember when I was in Switzerland with Seckendorf, 
that keen and profoundly skeptical man said, alluding to some 
monastic building seen in the distance : " Thorndale, if you and 
I could cease thinking our perplexing thoughts for four-and- 
twenty hours, we might, as the sun went down, walk together 
arm-in-arm, into yonder monastery." 



Cyril intimated to me that he should not quite forget Villa 
Sarpa, but that I must not expect to see him often. I did not 
understand whether the rules of his order, or rules that he 
thought fit to impose upon himself, would prevent him. Per- 
haps his conversation with me, bringing back unwelcome memo- 
ries, disturbed the perfect harmony of his life. 

I never see him now, as I sit under my acacia-tree, in his old 
haunt upon the sea-beach. Has he suspected that my terrace 
commanded the little promontory on which he liked to pause ,'* 



BOOK IV. 

SECKENDOEF; OR, THE SPIRIT OF DENIAL. 



" We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

Shakespeare. 

" Ah, croyez-moi I'erreur a son merite." 

VOLTAIRF. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF — HIS ATTACK ON 
clarence's UTOPIA. 

I MUST transport myself to Switzerland, and back to that 
pleasant time when I was enjoying the society of Clarence on 
the borders of the lake of Lucerne. It was then I met with 
Seckendorf. As I entered one morning the studio of the artist, 
I found my friend engaged in conversation with one who to me 
was a perfect stranger. He was evidently, however, an old ac- 
quaintance of Clarence. He was a man advanced in years, tall, 
with gray hair, with keen gray eyes, a large nose, and a some- 
what ruddy complexion. He w^alked erect and had a singularly 
commanding appearance. I took him at first sight for a military 
man, or for some German baron. I was introduced to him by 
the name of Dr, Seckendorf, and soon found that he spoke Eng- 
lish with the fluency of a native. There was, however, a foreign 
accent slightly traceable in his speech, and my first impression 
was not altogether erroneous. He was a German by birth, and 
although known in England as Dr. Seckendorf, an eminent phy- 
sician and physiologist, he assumed, when travelling abroad, the 
title, which he claimed by inheritance, of Baron von Seckendorf. 
How these apparent contrarieties came about, was afterwards 
explained, when, in a happy moment of expansion and commu- 
nicativeness, he gave us some details of his early life. 

I was not a little chagrined at first at finding a stranger in 
that chair by the easel which I had intended to occupy myself. 
My first impulse was to take flight : Clarence would not permit 
this ; and the Baron's or the Doctor's manners were so frank 
and cordial, that I was soon on a footing of perfect familiarity 
with pur new companion. Two men more opposed in their 

10* 



226 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

philosophical speculations than Clarence and Seckendorf, could 
hardly have been brought together; yet they were excellent 
friends. 

Seckendorf s philosophy stood as firm as a rock, and as hard 
and as barren. But he had no objection that you and others 
should cover up this rock — these hard bare facts of life — with 
whatever verdurous imagination you could get to grow there. 
If you brought to him Elysian pictures, whether of this world 
or the next, and held them up to him, for his own conviction, as 
realities he was to believe, he coldly repelled you, or he beat you 
down with his sarcasm. But if you spoke of them as convic- 
tions of the people — if you spoke of the great religious creeds 
of the world as portions the most remarkable in the drama of 
human life — you had his sympathies directly. As elements of 
this life, there was nothing he seemed to admire so much as our 
great imaginations of another life. You would think then, to 
hear him talk, that he was some great high-priest himself, some 
Egyptian hierarch, who, if he did not precisely believe all the 
mysteries and miracles he promulgated, had a sincere and not 
ignoble desire that others should believe. 

This made him so perplexing an antagonist for Clarence, to 
whom he delighted to show that the terrestrial progress he 
hoped for, was incompatible with the celestial expectations he 
still desired to retain. But whether on terrestrial or celestial 
ground, they totally differed ; yet, as I have said, they were old 
and excellent friends. They had, too, many tastes and studies 
in common. The Baron was fond of art, and the artist had 
been making incursions into the study of physiology. Clarence 
learned much from the scientific physician, and Seckendorf, I 
am sure, liked his artist-friend the better for those noble faiths in 
the destiny of man which he, nevertheless, unmercifully assailed. 
The two men alternately revealed each other's strength, each 
other's weakness. What animated controversies took place be- 
tween them ! We three sometimes sailed upon the lake together, 
sometimes climbed the mountains, or we sat in Clarence's studio, 
drinking endless and delicious cups of coffee ; but whether on the 
lake or the mountain, or imprisoned by the weather in Clarence's 
room, we were sure to break out into all manner of discussions, 



INTEODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 227 

scientific, artistic, socialistic — I know not what. There was no 
end to talk. And the talk never wearied, for it was infinitely- 
diversified. Both my companions were men of most varied 
culture. To me the frank exhilarating intercourse of such 
minds was a pleasure as novel as it was great, and in every way 
an immense advantage. 

I could not undertake to revive our conversations, so as to 
follow the rapid play of question and answer, objection and 
reply ; but I can recall much of what Clarence, and still more 
of what Seckendorf said in our numerous discussions. As I 
write on, the pen will assist my memory. I am not sure that 
those who write altogether fictitious dialogues, and who, in order 
to keep alive the attention of the reader, distribute to each 
speaker short and pungent passages, give a fair representation 
of real conversation, such as it takes place between intellectual 
equals. It generally happens, I think, that there is either very 
sharp practice, and a rapid interchange of answer and reply, 
(which would be quite bewildering if accurately reported,) or 
else one of the speakers gets for a time the right to be listened 
to till he has fairly developed his idea, subject, of course, to 
brief interruptions from those who are critically watching his 
progress. 

Of course the first thing that occurs to my recollection can be 
no other than SeckendorFs attack on his friend's Utopia. I 
have said that, as Clarence looked forward to some new arrange- 
ment to be gradually brought about between capital and labour, he 
occasionally used language which confounded him with Socialists 
and Communists. Seckendorf, in his attack, did not always care 
to discriminate, or would perhaps have denied that his friend 
had any right to the discrimination he claimed. His attack, 
therefore, was often of a very slashing description, and more justly 
applied, as I thought, to other speculators than to Clarence. 

" Do you not see," Clarence would say, " that the intellect is 
everywhere opening to the great idea of the good of the whole ? 
And do you not see that our industrial arts are putting into our 
hands the power to realize the idea ? The new power, in fact, 
assists in germinating the idea." 

Seckendorf would not see any thing of the kind. But before 



228 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

I can introduce his denying-philosophy, I must let Clarence dis- 
course a little farther in his own hopeful way. This he would 
do in something of the following style. 

CLARENCE. 

Our mechanical inventions have been accused of lending their 
aid principally to the men of capital and the men of wealth, and 
thus widening the breach between the rich and the poor. The 
accusation is unfounded, and for this reason : Whatever is gained 
in the lower stages of civilization — as the decent healthy mode 
of life — is of far more importance than additions afterw^ards 
made to refinement or luxury. Every addition to the comfort 
of the poor man approximates his condition to that of the rich, 
far more than any addition to the rich man's luxury can still 
further remove him from the condition of the poor. Therefore 
our great mechanical inventions, by multiplying homely com- 
modities (as they have done to a surprising extent) for the 
lower classes, do far more towards raising them, than they can 
do towards raising still higher the already civilized classes. A 
man is little better than a beast without certain essentials of 
clothing and habitation. These being obtained, subsequent 
improvements in his condition are of less importance. More is 
done for the poor by multiplying cotton garments, than can be 
done for the rich by substituting silk for cotton. Every brick 
that is laid in a poor man's cottage, is of vastly more importance 
to him than any amount of decorative architecture can possibly 
be to the man who has already a sound roof over his head. 

But if it may be still said that our mechanical inventions, by 
favouring the accumulation of capital in a few hands, give at 
least increased power to wealth, and in this manner aggravate 
the inequalities of rank, there is, at all events, one invention, 
one machine, which is constantly occupied in effacing inequali- 
ties, and in teaching wealth how wisely to use its power. The 
Printing Press is constantly occupied in extending the intelli- 
gence of the Few to the Many. It is scattering abroad our 
intellectual wealth ; it is raising all classes to an hitellectual 
level ; it is, as a necessary result, awakening new sympathies 
amongst all classes, and binding all into one whole — one whole 



INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 229 

to which all have to render a service according to their power. 
Intellectual equality, in very many noble ways, is tending to 
redress the inequalities of wealth. 

The Printing Press, with other mechanic arts associated 
with it, gives us the Cheap Book — newspaper, pamphlet, call it 
what you will — call it generally the Cheap Booh. It stands, you 
say, for an infinite variety of matter, and every description of 
idea, good and bad. It stands, I know, for a whole system of 
education. The Cheap Book is our University for the People ; 
and not so very bad a one either. For Parliamentary educa- 
tion, I think, we may wait long ; nor am I in the least solicitous 
about it. The voluntary beneficence which we see in active 
operation is far preferable. A teaching to read is already ac- 
complished, or nearly so, for all classes ; the rest will be accom- 
plished by the poor scholars themselves. Knowledge, as it 
extends, becomes more and more a want, and the want will lead 
to the increased acquisition. 

Through whatever schools or universities any man passes, 
that essential part of his education which makes him a thinking 
being (if a thinking being he ever becomes) is a very simple 
business. The faculty of reading, some discipline of memory 
and attention, access to books, and association with others who 
are also reading books — this is all that can be done for him. 
The next and vital step he takes for himself. It is the solitary 
perusal of some thought-stirring volume which marks to every 
man his true entrance into intellectual life. The day when he 
took his Locke or his Bacon, and spread it upon his knees, and 
grappled with it alone, and thought it out all over again for him- 
self and in his own fashion — this was his intellectual birthday, 
the true commencement of his thought-life. The book which not 
only gives us its thoughts, but stirs our own within us, is our 
first, and last, and only veritable teacher. And the thought- 
stirring volume, with the power to read.it, will soon be in every 
man's hand. 

Now, if people begin to think together and to feel together, 
they will also begin to work together. There is no form of co- 
operation recognized as desirable, that would not also be possi- 
ble to such a people. I will not venture to declare what organ- 



230 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

ization of society may in future be accomplished, but I do most 
unhesitatingly assert that this faculty, generated in each one, of 
thinking for the whole, and sympathizing widely with others, 
must lead to some new and happy organization. 

SECKENDORF. 

There are persons, my dear Clarence, who find it a very 
interesting occupation to plan imaginary communities, and shape 
for all others some precise methodical existence which it pleases 
them to approve. Harmless occupation, since, thank Heaven ! 
they shape nothing but their own nonsense. It is a very poor 
fragment of human life that any one mind can embrace, and 
mould, and organize. The real organization of society is ac- 
complished for us, much as the seasons and the climate that we 
live in have been organized. The infinite variety of nature 
laughs to scorn your little garden-plots. You may hedge and 
ditch as you will, you will not turn into little garden-plots all our 
great world of wastes and forests, and redundant vegetation. 
For me, I would rather be a wild dog in a forest, with the 
chance of being devoured by the first bigger dog I met with, 
than I would live shut up in one of these model moral communi- 
ties. I become a rebel to all morality when I am so demoral- 
ized. All very well if we were a parcel of polyps, and had one 
stomach in common, and your only task was to drench this well 
with black broth. But we happen not to have one stomach 
in common, much less one mind. 

CLARENCE. 

But I am no Communist. 

SECKENDORF. 

You are for new organization of some kind, — you are for 
binding us closer than before, — forging new chains for the coup- 
ling of us together. I "\yish that some of you schemers of new 
societies could be caught in your own trap, — caught and penned 
in your own Dutch Elysium. These ardent schemers contend 
and fight for their idea, their scheme ; and the fighting for it is 
pleasant enough ; they are the last men who could live in their 
own Utopia. They remind me, in this respect, of the battle- 



INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 231 

loving Crusaders of olden times. These steel-clad warriors, 
armed to the teeth, went forth to fight for the Madonna, — went 
forth, mind you, to fight, — meanwhile the Paradise they were 
to win by their swords was of the most peaceable description. 
These valiant pikemen never once asked themselves whether in- 
deed they greatly desired to sit down quiet and docile, like good 
children, in the presence of that sweet Mater Dolorosa, whose 
picture they constantly saw in their churches. What they were to 
do — these steel-clad pikemen — amongst the doves and the cherubs 
— never crossed their thoughts. Simply they loved fighting, — 
and here was the Madonna to fight for. Battle ! — and the battle 
itself a work of piety ! — what could the heart of man desire more ? 
Our own enthusiastic champions of some millennium of perpetual 
peace and social industry are much of the same temper. Here is 
something to contend for — here is their Madonna — and they con- 
tend zealously enough. But how would they look if they were 
really transported to their industrial paradise, where work and 
playtime should be meted out to them with due regularity, and 
their docile labours be rewarded (let us be liberal in our conjec- 
tures) with unlimited supply of plain clothes and plain diet. I 
think they would be curiously disappointed at the aspect of their 
sad Madonna. Was this the lady that had so often inspired their 
intellectual combats ? 

^^Idea of the good of the whole!" All this my dear young 
friend, is but the old pastoral fable tricked out in philosophic 
phrase. It is some foolish Arcadia you promise us, and you 
think to justify the prediction by placing it a great way off. Why 
not promise it to-morrow, or the next age, as well as some cen- 
turies hence ? 

CLARENCE. 

Simply because the education of the race is, by its very nature, 
this slow process. Man has to make the changed circumstance 
which afterwards re-makes him. The improvement which one 
age effects becomes an instrument to mould and educate the next 
generation. 

SECKENDORF. 

Yes ! the age that invented this good water-proof clothing, of 



282 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

which we have all of us here excellent specimens, was educating 
the next age to the habitual use and want of it. The age that 
invented rapidity of locomotion was bringing many modifications 
of business and pleasure to the next age. What a glorious edu- 
cation for its posterity did that age supply which first invented — 
gin or tobacco. But this is not precisely the sort of education 
of which you have been speaking. You speak of ideas already 
in the world, and their dissemination by books. Now, we can 
pretty well estimate at once what this can do for us. 

What, according to your own account, does this much-talked 
"education of the people" consist in ? — what is the simple fact ? 
Certain books now read by the leisure class will be read by a 
class who have less leisure, read at least not more attentively 
than they are at present. Meanwhile choose me any half dozen 
of the best books whose circulation is to be extended by the in- 
creased activity of the Printing Press, — you will not find that any 
two of them are in perfect harmony or agreement, — you will have 
(taking them all together) a perfect Babel of conflicting doctrines, 
tastes, sentiments, opinions. What new or surprising unanimity 
of action will you get out of this ? Lay hold of the first handful 
of books that may be now standing on your library table, and 
proceed to consult them as your oracle, — what a din of yes ! and 
no ! will assail your ears ! Just as education spreads, diversity 
of opinion will spread with it. One sees no unanimity except 
amongst a multitude who do not think, and perchance amongst a 
priesthood who think for that multitude, — think how to guide 
and govern them. The moment men begin to reflect, they begin 
to differ, and precisely on those subjects which affect the institu- 
tions of society. Suppose all men became readers and thinkers, 
we should have a scene of interminable controversy opening wider 
and wider. What especially good result — what novel unanimity 
of action, I repeat — do you expect from that ? 

I make no moan about it. Life developes itself thus. The 
more complexity in the whole society, the more variety in the 
individuals. The individual can less and less embrace all that is 
developed in humanity. 

I cannot expect, in the most complex development of life, to 
be able to trace that order, method, regularity, which I trace in 



INTKODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 233 

the simplest, — that method and regularity which is the founda- 
tion of scientific prediction. If I prick a man, he will bleed ; 
what form his anger will assume, is not so clear. As we rise in 
complexity, prediction becomes less possible. When we observe 
in the tentacula or limbs of some simplest specimen of animal 
life a quite rhythmical movement, we pronounce such movement 
to be automatic, not voluntary or instigated by passion or desire, 
because of its exceeding regularity. If you could show me a 
society whose movements were quite rhythmical, I am sure I 
should see before me the very lowest form of human society. 
Increased thought and increased activity will not display them- 
selves in a rhythmical society. 

Men and women are to be all very wise, and therefore very 
good, and therefore very happy ! Such very moral philosophy 
we teach to little children, and do indeed leave for the practice 
of a most remote posterity. On the ears of an old man nothing 
falls so light as these ethical abstractions, these vague eloquent 
moralities. They are pretty and teasing, as th^ snow-flakes that 
blind you for an instant with their brightness. Nothing lighter 
or colder falls through the air. 

You are speculating, Clarence, on the development of the 
thinking faculty amongst all classes of men. Pray look around 
you. Scarcely one in a thousand of any class, under any circum- 
stances, can be got to think. I have lived in most capitals of 
Europe ; I have seen your highest and your lowest ; I have min- 
gled with all classes. I tell you that men do not love the labour 
of thinking ; rich or poor, they love it not ; it is a toil, a disturb- 
ance ; it wearies, it afflicts them. Here and there the propensity 
is developed, and chiefly, like some other plagues, where the diet 
is low, and the dwelling is dark, and the air is stagnant. In some 
constitutions, whatever may be the surrounding circumstances, 
the fever will break out, and then it makes of the man — as 
chance or the multitude will have it — a god or a demon. 

Your Cheap Book ! your sheet of printed paper ! A sail 
blown by all winds, — nothing but this rag of canvas, and a hull 
to move huge as a mountain. Gossamer sail, and a stowage like 
Noah's ark. Not much navigation here, I think. 



234 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

CLARENCE. 

But this hull, this ark, does sail. It moves ! it moves ! 

SECKENDORF. 

It rocks ! it rocks ! 

I marvel, Clarence, that you do not see that the pensive 
labours of the brain belong, and must belong, to a small and 
especial class. You, who give them to all, of course calculate 
upon uniting in the same person manual and intellectual toils. 
You will do so when you can build a house, or make a railroad, 
by scientific delicate manipulations. Bring me a blowpipe, and 
blow me a bridge over the Thames. You cannot; you want 
the Cyclopian forge and the brawny Cyclops himself. Did you 
ever note a common bricklayer — how lightly he tosses that brick 
in his hand, chipping off with his trowel, if need be, a bit from 
this end or from that ? A most light and facile operation, as it 
seems. Try it some day. That brick he handles and plays 
with like a toy, will scarify your hand, and jar your brain, and 
yet probably suggest a useful thought or two. We must wait 
till we build houses as we blow bubbles in the air, before the 
same nervous system will suit the man who builds the house, 
and him who lives meditative or pleasurably in it. 

I, all cynic as I am, or as men please to report me, admire the 
results of civilization, and what the Labour of one class has 
eifected for the Refinement of another. Our huge Hercules 
holds a graceful nymph in his brawny arms. I, the cynic, 
admire and would preserve the classic group. Poets and phi- 
lanthropists think his brawny arms are tired — beg him to rest and 
relax — and, alas ! alas ! my delicate goddess falls into the dirt. 

CLARENCE. 

Not so ; but in that classic group you seem to have in your 
imagination, does the brawny Hercules carry the nymph for 
some other, or himself? I think for himself. Refinement there 
fills the arm of Labour : the reward is not separated from the 
toil. To leave metaphor alone, I do not think it impossible that, 
in some future age, the Labour of all classes will effect the Re- 
finement of all classes. 



INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 235 
SECKENDOHF. 

You would divide the labour and the results of labour more 
equally ; you would destroy both. You would divide the labour, 
you would double the distress of it. Set up in any human being 
two contradictory and antagonistic trains of thought and feeling, 
and all the luxury of the world will never fondle that man into 
peace and contentment. With harmony of thought and action, 
and nature's all-healing force of habit, there is no condition in 
which the human frame can be supported, in which life is not 
very tolerable. Men live in Kamschatka, boastful of their cli- 
mate; men labour in the mines, forgetful of the sun ; the citizen 
of London lives contented amidst smoke and bricks, and leaves 
clear skies, fresh air, and unpolluted rivers, to the pitiable savages 
who know nothing of commerce. But interfere with this kindly 
process of accommodation, and yon immediately have querulous, 
distorted, feeble, miserable men. Trust me, Clarence, the man 
who works hard, and sleeps soundly, is not a creature to be 
pitied. Introduce desires with which his work is not compatible, 
and you will make him one. 

Man was set down here upon the earth with none to help him — 
but man ; with none to help him, and so much to do. " On his 
first entrance upon this newly formed planet," says a legend I 
somewhere remember to have read, "certain of the angels 
looked on with admiring solicitude. It had been rumoured that 
the new creature was to be in some measure rational, and so far 
resembling themselves ; and when they observed how very little 
preparation had been apparently made for his reception in the 
planet he was to occupy — not a blade of grass anywhere grow- 
ing that he could eat, and the very tools he was to work with 
lying a formless mass buried in the earth — they naturally 
watched the progress of affairs with increasing wonder and 
suspense. What new power, or what auxiliary creature, would 
next appear upon the scene ? Nothing of the kind appeared. 
The same man, the same creature, did all. It was the same 
accommodating human clay which rose into the philosopher, and 
roughened into the ploughman. Marvellous was it to behold. 
And when, moreover, they observed that the ploughman never 
wished to be the philosopher, nor the philosopher the plough- 



236 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

man, they could contain their admiration no longer, and, striking 
upon their golden har2~>s, they broke forth into a hymn," — which 
I regret exceedingly to be unable to repeat to you. 

The arrangement which gave so great delight to these angelic 
critics, our speculative philanthropists are disposed to set aside. 
Since man is everywhere the same original clay, why not every- 
Mdiere developed into the same form ? Whatever else he may 
be, he shall, at all events, be the meditative man. It shall be 
Clarence here, and Clarence there, and Clarence everywhere. 
Meanwhile we may note, that these meditative men — unless 
they happen to be living altogether for another world, which is 
the most fortunate tendency they can display both for themselves 
and for us — have really no occupation or amusement except that of 
reforming mankind. Each one of them requires a world to re- 
form for his amusement — can be amused or occupied on no 
other terms. Of such a class of men one may say, in the lan- 
guage of the political economist, the demand must be necessarily 
very limited. I will not add, that the supply already seems 
excessive, lest my friend Clarence should take it as a personal 
allusion. 

CLARENCE. 

No one knows better than Seckendorf that it is not necessary 
for a man to be only, or preeminently, a thinker or philoso- 
pher, in order to share in such knowledge as thinkers and 
philosophers have given to the world. There is a certain uni- 
versal culture of which each one already l^egins to partake. 
Every child may now know wdiat Copernicus and Gahleo dis- 
covered or taught. 

SECKENDORF. 

Every child, every fool may know it, and remain a fool. No 
one knows better than Clarence, that it is not that knowledge 
wdiich has been merely drawn in by the ear, which can answer 
his purpose. He is looking forward to a self-governing multi- 
tude, each one of whom embraces in his comprehension the 
whole society, and takes his place therein, with full consciousness 
and approval of his own relation to that whole. It is knowledge, 
therefore, laboriously acquired, and inducing habits of thought — 



INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 237 

it is the reflective character that he wants. Now, this reflective 
character, I take it, must necessarily be rare. It is a very low 
standard of it that most men attain to ; nor is it, as I have said, 
compatible with the ordinary and indispensable avocations of 
life. Perhaps an illustration from our physiological studies will 
be more acceptable than my golden legend. 

As you well know, it is only in the lowest forms of organiza- 
tion that we find the various susceptibilities or powers of animal 
life diffused indiscriminately over the whole substance of the 
animal. In certain zoophytes each part shall be capable of 
every function. One uniform tissue, in some misshapen crea- 
ture, shall digest, shall feel, shall be susceptible to light, shall 
have the contractihty necessary to movement, shall, in some sort, 
be hand, and eye, and foot, and stomach. When we rise to a 
superior organization, these several capabilities are withdrawn 
from the common substance, are lodged in a specific organ, and 
at the same time immeasurably exalted. In like manner, with 
regard to human society, the degree of reflective power diffused 
over the whole surface of it must necessarily be slight. If it is 
to be highly developed, there must be a special organ to which 
other organs are administrative — a select class for its peculiar 
localization and development. 

I have heard you quote with great zest a line from your 
favourite philosophic poet — 

" What is one 
Why may not millions fte ? " 

I will undertake to answer the question of the poet ; first, 
because nature creates for variety, and this variety is interwoven 
with the very scheme of things : and secondly, because that 
" one " whom the poet has especially in view could not exist 
without the "million" very much unlike him. What educates a 
thinking man ? Science and Humanity. Chiefly the last — the 
study of his fellow man. And wdiat would he have to study, if 
all men had resembled himself? What would he have had to 
think about, if it were not for the passions, follies, and super- 
stitions of mankind ? 

" What is one 
Why may not millions be ? " 



238 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER I. 

Because the millions have lived for this one — not only toiled 
for him, but dreamt absurd dreams for him — acted the wildest 
tragedies for him — framed the most terrible superstitions to feed 
his reflection withal. A whole world of error, as well as of 
labour, go to make this one reflective man. " All men are to be 
wise," — " easier for all to be wise than one." I tell you, 
Clarence, paradoxical as it may sound, that " all men wise " is 
tantamount to " no wise man." The materials of thought are 
gone — the materials which spontaneous humanity gives to hu- 
manity reflective. 

CLARENCE. 

Such materials live in history. Past ages are to society what 
past years are in the life of the individual. 

SECKENDORF. 

Live in history! Who cares for dead mythologies? The 
driest skeletons I know of Who cares for druidical sacrifices, 
or the hall of Odin, or the worship of Nero ? Let the dead bury 
their dead ; it is the living who teach the living. 

THORNDALE. 

It certainly does not seem to be in the order of things, that 
what is most excellent should be most common. 

There is more sea than land : three-fourths of the globe is 
covered with salt water. 

There is more barren land than fertile ; much is sheer desert, 
or hopeless swamp ; great part wild arid steppes, or land that 
could be only held in cultivation by incessant toil. 

Where nature is most prolific, there is more weed and jungle 
than fruit and flower. 

Of the animal creation, the lowest orders are by far the most 
numerous. The infusoria and other creatures that seem to 
enjoy no other sensations than what are immediately connected 
with food and movement (if even these), far surpass all others 
in this respect. The tribes of insects are innumerable; the 
mammalia comparatively few. 

Of the human inhabitants of the earth, the ethnologist tells us 
that the Mongolian race is the most numerous, which is not 



INTRODUCTION TO SECKENDORF. 239 

certainly the race in which the noblest forms of civilization have 
appeared. As in the tree there is more leaf than fruit, so in the 
most advanced nation of Europe there are more ignorant than 
wise, more poor than rich, more automatic labourers, the mere 
creatures of habit, than reasoning and reflective men. 

SECKENDORF. 

We cannot pretend always to assign a law for such propor- 
tions ; but, as a wide generalization, we may say, that what we 
call a higher excellence is a greater complication, and its mani- 
festation must be more restricted, because a larger number of 
antecedent conditions are necessary for that manifestation. All 
matter has the property of inertia, or mere space-occupancy. 
It is doubtful if all matter has the property of gravity. All 
matter may have some chemical properties, but each specific 
chemical property (or that peculiar molecular movement or 
attraction supposed to constitute it) must have a restricted area 
of manifestation, since it is by relationships between these that 
chemical phenomena are produced. The phenomena of life 
manifest themselves in a still more restricted area, since the 
organic depends at each moment on the inorganic. Thus, as we 
rise in the scale, the requisite conditions being more multifarious, 
the more excellent thing is comparatively rare ; and the same 
law is vaguely traceable in human society. Certain properties 
belong to all mankind, as to all living creatures ; such, for 
instance, as pertain to self-preservation and the perpetuity of the 
race. They are as general as gravity in the inorganic world. 
But if certain characters are to be developed as the strong, the 
weak, the virtuous, the vicious, the tender, the heroic, then our 
common humanity must submit to certain subdivisions, just as the 
inorganic world had to submit to certain subdivisions in order 
that chemical phenomena should be displayed. And I think you 
will find that the higher we advance in these human characters, 
the more complicated must be the society out of which they are 
elicited. — But w^e will not lose ourselves in these generalities. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE SILVER SHILLING. 



Clakence could not make head against the vigorous attacks 
of his keen adversary. He more than once rallied, but Secken- 
dorf fairly talked him down. After some interval, I remember 
the controversy broke out again in some such manner as this : 

clarence. 
You will never listen patiently, Seckendorf, or hear me to the 
end ; you will never let me develop my idea completely. I 
cannot be accused of wishing to introduce novelties or contradic- 
tions into men's habits, by mere acts of legislation ; on the con- 
trary, it is the slow modification of habits and modes of thought 
which, I presume, will produce new legislation. 

seckendorf. 
Not listened patiently ! Who, except that long-eared melan- 
choly mule on which you ride about these mountains, and to 
whom I know you preach Utopia, has ever been compelled to 
listen to you so patiently as I have done ? I wish you would 
look at real life with half the pertinacity you explore the ideal 
history of future ages. If, after thoroughly appreciating the 
organization of society that at present exists, you can invent a 
better, I will say you are not only a prophet, but a creator. 
That changes will ensue, who thinks of denying ? In a world, 
where the very rocks are but records of change, what is it we 
expect to be stable ? But I deny that changes of this kind can 
be possibly foreseen. The predictions of science are predictions 
of repetition — not of novelties; of repeated developments, not 
new developments. Who can foretell what new animal (sup- 



THE SILVER SHILLING. 241 

posing new animals are still to be produced) will come upon the 
scene ? 

This (holding up a silver shilling), this is our last great or- 
ganizer of society. Let us well understand what miracles this 
silver shilling is daily performing, before we think to displace it 
from the head of the Government. 

You have amongst your collections of English poetry, a poem 
by one Phillips, " On the Silver Shilling." What he has made 
of his theme I do not know ; I have only read the title of the 
poem ; but a nobler theme no poet could desire. It is really a 
magical talisman, which transports me where I will, and finds 
me food and raiment, and everywhere a welcome. And there is 
something poetical withal in the sense of power which this talis- 
man gives ; for with what a halo of enjoyment does the imagi- 
nation invest it ! Mere barter, the exchange of one thing for 
another, is a poor limited process, and felt to be as much a loss 
as a gain. My Silver Shilling represents not this or that paltry 
commodity, but all possible shilling-worths of every thing on earth. 
This glittering coin gives me command, as with a sceptre, over 
all the varied products of human industry — up to a certain point. 
Is not this a perfect realization of Democratic equality ? Each 
man, in his turn, commands, up to the amount of his coin, the 
whole labour of the community. Beautiful invention ! Some 
god inspired it. Could any number of world-reformers produce 
me such an organization of society as this ? 

THORNDALE. 

I suppose that Clarence would be contented with it, if you 
could but secure that the coin should fall into the right hand. 
If it always represented fair remuneration for some labour or 
service rendered to society by its possessor, then the power it 
gives over the labour of others would be a most equitable and 
admirable arrangement. 

SECKENDORF. 

In the main it does. It has introduced all the equity we can 
boast of in this matter of remuneration of labour. Talk of 
philanthropy ! It was the Silver Shilling that knocked off the 
11 



242 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER II. 

fetters of the slave. How was the substitute of wages for the 
lash to be introduced till there was this " circulating medium " 
by which wages could be paid ? 

I am amused when I hear of great ideas governing the world. 
There are great facts governing the world, which, when men 
come to understand them, are then his ideas ; but they governed 
the world long before he had worked them into his theorem. 
After many centuries, he gets some inkling into the laws by 
which society, or the planetary system, proceeds ; but he had as 
little to do with the construction of the one as of the other. 
The man who first coined money knew as little what he was 
doing, as the ox whose image he is said to have stamped upon it. 
He was bringing in a new era — new relations between man and 
man — new forms, and new government, or organization of society. 
No doubt, as the Pagan would say, some god invented money — 
some Mercury or Plutus. These old heathens had a certain 
modesty in them, and always recognized in whatever shape it 
came, that the " Promethean fire " was not their own. Some 
god had given it, or peradventure had stolen it out of heaven ; 
for to their benighted understandings, it did not seem that the 
celestial powers had originally intended to be very liberal to- 
wards man. 

My dear Clarence, I beg of you to recognize this simple truth 
— which those who talk much about benevolence forget — that the 
great substantial pleasure of life is necessarily effort for ourself. 
My dear Clarence, we don't want your phihmthropy — this work- 
ing painfully for the general good. The philanthropic end is 
brought about in a far more genial manner ; and mainly through 
the instrumentality of our Silver Shilling. Each man has all the 
keen enduring pleasures of selfishness — of strenuous effort for 
himself and for his family — whilst working out the very objects 
of benevolence. For your benevolent sentiment, whatever you 
may think of it, is, after all, a very weak and mawkish business, 
when set side by side by the genuine striving after self-advance- 
ment. The first passion of all organic nature is what we are 
pleased to call selfish ; the sympathetic and the benevolent are 
beautiful creations, but are feeble in comparison, like reflected 
liirht. 



THE SILVER SHILLING. 243 

Suppose a traveller, knowing nothing of this subtle " circu- 
lating medium," should come — say from the moon, if you will, 
for we must go far to fetch so unsophisticated a creature — sup- 
pose a traveller, ignorant of the subtle operation of the Silver 
Shilling, should visit our great cities, what a benevolent, what an 
angelic race he would take us for ! Down comes the rain — if he 
should happen to alight in London, and be plodding through its 
endless streets — pelting, pitiless, drenching the pedestrian to the 
skin. Every one flies for shelter. But the rain pursues them. 
What are the delicate and the infirm to do ? — this lady all ele- 
gance ? Even yonder dandy you pity in his all too permeable 
attire. But no ! every one does not fly. Here are men of 
heroic mould, heroic garments, cased to the throat in capes of 
oilskin, who take their stand with horse and covered carriage, 
ready and solicitous to bear off whomsoever wishes, safe and dry 
to his own home. Heroic men ! they even came forth in greater 
numbers as the shower threatened. What company of saints 
ever performed so acceptable a service? Our traveller must 
indeed have visited other planets, if he ever met with such 
ready, constant, serviceable saints as these — who, nevertheless, 
are not reputed to be saints at all. 

There is no end of the heroism he would see displayed in 
London. Here is a scavenger, up to his knees in liquid mud, 
shovelling the pestiferous mass into a huge cart; himself all 
mud, that others may go clean ; and most unsavoury, that others 
may breathe fresh air. Greater self-denial can no man show — 
a more trying martyrdom no man endure. Our traveller, com- 
ing from the moon, where, doubtless, all is done for honour and 
the public good, looks eagerly for the " order of merit," which 
surely must be glittering round the neck of this burly philanthro- 
pist. In his enthusiasm, he perhaps snatches some moonshine 
of this description from his own neck, and, stretching from the 
pavement, seeks to hang it on the bosom of his hero. Quite 
unnecessary. The silver medal in his breeches' pocket had 
done it all. 

How would Utopia ever get its scavenger ? Is there any way 
of feeding and rearing a man at the public expense, by which 
one could develope him into a scavenger ? What sort of bee- 



244 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER II. 

hread, I wonder, would convert an ordinary worker, in our 
human hive, into so remarkable a " busy bee," one of so abnor- 
mal an industry? My notion is, that without the Silver Shil- 
ling one must go back to the days of the captive and the scourge 
— back to those times when nations warred with nations, and 
stole each other, and so got their scavengers and the like. 

These men of heroic lives, these huge coal-heavers, and those 
who dive into sewers, or work in the dark bowels of the earth, 
what college, or what pious institutions, raised these self-devoted? 
The ale-house rears them ; gin and porter inspire them ; their 
speech is very rude ; very little tenderness or sentiment of any 
kind will you get from that pavier, pounding with his huge 
pestle those granite blocks ; — I am afraid he would pound your 
ribs, if they were under his pestle, with almost as little remorse. 
But see what they do. What are systems of philosophy, or 
systems of theology, your institutions, and your churches, to 
what these rude men effect — what only such men coidd accom- 
plish? Admire with me how the magic of the Silver Shilling 
has constrained such men to the severest works of patriotism 
and philanthropy. 

There would be no end to the astonishment of our moon-born 
traveller. Have you a want ? Have you a whim ? Down 
every street you wander, what kind solicitude to gratify it ! 
Silk, and gold, and jewels, and bland servitors to offer them, and 
smiling at you as you carry them away. I know not whether 
his astonishment would be greater at all this practical philan- 
thropy, or on the discovery of that beautiful invention of the 
Silver Shilling, by which it is all brought about. 

CLARENCE. 

Beautiful invention ! terrible power ! What is to become of 
him who has not the talisman ? He must be the slave of him 
who has. Let us hope, one day, as Thorndale has suggested, 
that the talisman may be in the hand of every one ; then the 
government of the Silver Shilling will be truly, and in the very 
best sense, democratic. And I think sometimes I see how this 
result will be gradually accomplished. 



THE SILVER SHILLING. 245 

SECKENDORF. 

Before you explain how this universal mo7iey-hood (which 
would be indeed a very agreeable addition to the old brother- 
hood we hear of so much) is to be brought about, let me com- 
plete my poem on the Silver ShilHng, and show what sort of 
rule and government it has at present. What, in all our dis- 
putes, is the last umpire ? Force ! What is the ultimate ruler 
in every state ? The Sword ! And the Silver Shilling buys 
the sword. Note how the social mechanism works. When the 
hahit of obedience (how much there is in that little word hahit /) 
is from any cause broken, it is the military power which steps in 
to restore order and government. The rabble of every great 
city is constantly kept in peace by a certain visible array of the 
musket or the constable's staff. Even during the most peaceful 
pageantries, I hear at least the rattle of the sheathed sabre on 
the pavement. But how is it, since Force is supreme, that we 
are not always under military rule ? how is it, that wealth and 
refinement are not subject to the harsh tyranny of the sword ? 
Because our Silver Shilling buys the soldier ! recruits him, 
marshalls him, buys him from the drummer to the general. 
Wealth still rules, and through the sword. 

There is still another power, which boasts to have much to do 
with the stability and the government of society, and which, if 
uncontrolled, could at any time shake it to its foundations. There 
is a power which holds the keys of Heaven and of Hell. The 
priest can at any time excite a spirit of rebellion, which mocks 
even at military force, since the sword that kills the body liber- 
ates the soul for Paradise. 

The priest — if we could see him pure priest — would be found 
naturally arrayed against wealth ; he preaches an ascetic moral- 
ity ; it is to the poor he can always open the gates of heaven ; 
the rich man is very often contented with the earth, and does 
not look that way, and is slow of faith. He could, at any junc- 
ture that was propitious to his teaching, revolutionize society. 
But our Silver Shilling buys the priest — has bought him long 
ago — puts him permanently on the side of order and of wealth. 
He whose natural function would be — with a believing populace 
at his beck — to lay civilization in the dust, is too civilized him- 



246 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER II. 

self, has too pleasant a share of this civilization, to do any thing 
of the kind. He preaches a very modified asceticism, and, above 
all, he preaches to his long-eared flock a patient obedience to 
that wicked Dives, whom they are only hereafter to triumph 
over. Our Silver Shilling reigns supreme. It has organized 
our hierarchy. It rules in church and state, and reconciles them 
both. 

Once more, and I have done. There is yet another power 
that rises in these later days to compete with the sword and the 
crosier — the power of the Pen. Men call it the Fourth Estate. 
In the strife between the Haves and the Have nots, what a new 
element is here! Will not the Have nots become intelligent, 
become literary men, and wielding this new force, cease to obey, 
and make rebels of others ? What has become of our govern- 
ment of the Silver Shilling ? Here is flat rebellion. Not so. 
The Silver Shilling buys the literary man. This written speech 
flows on without ceasing, flows on quite harmless. The clever 
Have nots are purchased, enlisted, set to keep the peace against 
the less capable brotherhood of the same order. 

" Equality of intelligence will in some indirect way redress 
the inequality of wealth " — this is your favourite formula. Mean- 
•while I notice this, that such intelligence as wealth has and 
approves — that and no other — ventures to show itself abroad in 
speech or writing. If any other makes its appearance, the book 
dies out, and the speaker has a chance of dying too — starved out, 
if he is a poor man. I enter the drawing-room of an opulent 
citizen. I see there a wealthy blockhead ; I see also, standing 
beside him on the hearth-rug, an intelligent, educated, profes- 
sional gentleman. I listen to the conversation. The intelligent 
and educated man is dealing forth, with infinite pains, a species 
of mitigated Uockheadism — and why ? that he may bring himself 
down to the level of his opulent companion and patron. It is 
wealth, you see, that holds the spirit-level. That is the line of 
truth along which Dives looks. What falls below is folly, what 
rises above is worse ; it is wicked and presumptuous folly. I 
tell you that there is not an old woman with our Silver Shilling 
in her pocket, who has not more influence on the expression, 
and consequently on the formation of opinion, than the greatest 
genius of your Fourth Estate. 



THE SILVER SHILLING. 247 

Wealth is the god of this world. We are told so by the in- 
dignant satirist, and by the mournful preacher, and we are told 
so by the political economist, who understands the matter much 
better than either. It is the best god, or ruler, the highest 
avatar, the world has yet known. It is the dominant power; 
but it extinguishes no other great power, only moderates and 
subordinates. It buys the sword, it buys the pen — but em^^loys 
too — and animates while it rules. From the king with his civil 
list, to the drummer-boy with his rations ; from the great capi- 
talist, or the great company, with their thousands of servants, to 
the decrepit old huckster who keeps an errand-boy — it is ruling, 
discipHning, marshalling — it is order, it is cooperation, it is gov- 
ernment. 

Improve, if you can, on this organization of society. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE WORLD AS IT IS — OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 
SECKENDORF. 

I STAND here, the advocate for the world as it is, and onr faiths 
as they are. For the world as it is, with its ignorant multitudes, 
and its wiser few, with its passions of hate and of love, its griefs, 
its consolations, its truths, its errors, and, above all, its great 
religious faiths, which are rooted in the sorrows and the wrongs 
of men. I do not ask if these are true ; enough for me that they 
are here. Even your Utopian dreams, if I saw that they made 
ten men happy, should have a place in the catalogue. I like this 
wild Avorld. I like the sinner, I like the saint ; I like its uproar- 
ious youth, and its penitent old age. Nor am I overmuch dis- 
tressed about the miseries of life. Every creature grows to its 
circumstances ; the fur grows rough as the climate roughens. 
This marvellous force of habit is a provision against all fortunes 
or misfortunes. I have tried it. I — Baron von Seckendorf — 
have lived in a garret, on a herring. Not agreeable. But the 
second herring was very savoury, and vastly welcome. 

CLARENCE. 

You look upon our great religious faiths merely as parts of 
life — as great delusions, in short. 

SECKENDORF. 

They do not owe their origin to philosophy or science, so far 
as I understand the matter. But they are spontaneous products 
of the imagination and the passions of men, which philosophy 
and science would do well to let alone; and which that "intel- 
lectual progress" you boast so much of, would assuredly put in 
peril. 



THE WORLD AS IT IS— OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 249 

Philosophy, so far as I have known her, is a very keen critic, 
but a very poor creator. She may adjust with somewhat more 
precision the thunderbolt in the hand of some Olympian Jupiter. 
But leave Philosophy to herself, and there will be first no thun- 
derbolt at all, and soon afterwards no Jupiter at all, or none that 
any ordinary vision can descry. 

I like this great life men lead in the imagination. With all 
its turmoils and terrors, and unspeakable contradictions, it is still 
the scene of our grandest emotions, and our most intense mental 
energy. If the reflective man, prompted by his love of truth, 
should thread his way out of this turmoil and confusion — should 
escape from the noise and tlie labyrinth of popular superstitions — 
he will think himself into mere solitude and a barren desolation ; 
he will gain no truths, and lose ail this life. He may congratu- 
late himself for a moment at his escape from the angry hubbub 
of conflicting faiths, but into what a blank and desolate region 
has he escaped ! When in the course of my travels I visited the 
city of Damascus, I was struck with this, — that the moment I 
issued, stunned and wearied, from its noisy, tortuous, and turbu- 
lent streets, — the moment I passed through the gates of the 
city, — I found myself alone in the desert. The sand comes up 
to the very walls. Here, too, the de.-ert receives us at the very 
walls of the city. Most men are glad enough to return to its 
noisy streets ; they hasten back before the gate has closed on 
them for ever. 

THORNDALE. 

Desert or not, there is at least one great Truth that reveals 
itself, — the being of God, — a truth that rides high in the heavens, 
clear and bright as the sun at noonday. 

SECKENDORF. 

" Bright as the sun at noonday ! " Is it always noonday with 
us, Thorndale ? Is there always a sun in our sky to hide from 
us the dark and illimitable space beyond ? Is there not also an 
Infinitude of Night and Stars ? And tell me — in the widest view 
we catch of the universe — is it light or darkness that chiefly pre- 
vails for the vision of a man ? 

The existence of God is clear to demonstration — till we ask 
11* 



250 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER III. 

ourselves what conception of God we can attain. JReason, — 
meaning thereby the unity of parts in a whole, — adaptation, har- 
mony, is everywhere apparent ; without it, I suppose, nothing 
exists that does exist. But the reasoning Being — how form this 
conception? To me The All seems to be the. only representa- 
tive, for us, of this Reason or Power ; for it is hard to give any 
name to what transcends all human thought. But we will not 
enter now — 

THORNDALE. 

O Seckendorf ! I must persist — 

SECKENDORF. 

Another time ! another time ! We will not enter now this 
obscurest, darkest chamber of human cogitation — the very cave 
of Trophonius, which whosoever enters, it is said, will never 
smile again. 

Let us look abroad on the world as it is, — on men as they 
think and believe. 

In Catholic countries, is it the market-place, or is it the church 
which often opens on it, that is the centre of the greatest and 
most exciting portion of human life ? I am not asking how far 
morality and government depend on the beliefs for which that 
church stands representative. I speak of the emotions, the hopes 
and fears, the consolations, the glowing fancies, that bring a whole 
world of angels and of saints about us, — I speak, in short, of the 
enormous development of our consciousness, or psychical exist- 
ence, which that building may typity for us. The tenets of our 
greatest church of Christendom and of the world may set at defi- 
ance the very testimony of your senses, — may absolutely triumph 
in their impossible and contradictory nature, — may throw scorn 
on all logic and consistency. Regarded as a system of truths, 
they may utterfy baffle and confound you. But look at them as 
they live in the minds of an assenting multitude, utterly uncon- 
scious that they either contradict nature, or each other, — look at 
them as they animate, and govern, and stir that multitude with 
intense emotions of wonder, and hope, and fear, — opening to each 
narrow petty life a vista of eternity, — look at them thus, and it is 
impossible not to bend before them with a certain feehng of awe 



THE WORLD AS IT IS— OCR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 251 

and of respect. Take now away that chnreb, and leave the mar- 
ket-place standing alone, how have jou impoverished, how have 
you pauperized existence ! 

Scarce an act of life is performed in our Catholic countries 
which may not be in some way related to the unseen world. I 
do not say that the conscience is always very much enlightened 
or fortified by the unseen guides and companions which men have 
called around them. When the imagination gets very familiar 
with its gods, it brings them down to the level of a quite ordinary 
humanity. The gods and saints of our people in the market-place 
may have much the same moral opinion as the very men and 
women with whom they talk and chaffer, beg from, and steal. A 
Neapolitan is just as hkely to call upon the Madonna to prosper 
him in his frauds as in his honest dealings. He cheats you and 
worships the Madonna, and cheats you with a freer conscience 
because he has worshipped. But take this worship from him, — 
you feel that half his life is gone. 

In Protestant London no saints or angels float in the air. It 
is difficult to understand how any force of imagination could bring 
them into that atmosphere of fog and smoke, or how the seductive 
paganism of Southern Christianity could have kept its ground in 
your great commercial and manufacturing cities. But you have 
retained whatever of doctrinal Christianity could be well kept 
together in any one system, — you have mysteries, and terrors, 
and pious sentiments and hopes, which fill up the else desert 
spaces of your hard and money-getting lives. Catch me that 
black-coated, tight-buttoned gentleman, pacing rapidly from the 
Exchange. Open his coat — open his breast — look in. Surely 
there is the strangest medley of contradictions that Time — who 
has indeed had whole centuries for the work — ever welded to- 
gether. This man is trotting up and down from bank to bank, 
from office to office, in restless search of money ; and he is trot- 
ting along, so he tells you, at the same time, "to his abiding city," 
to his spiritual home. He makes bargains on the Stock Exchange, 
or elsewhere, — his very occupation is a perpetual gambling ; and 
he grows richer year by year, and thanks God for it, and prays 
in the same breath to be made like — O heavens ! — like him who 
is the great type of self-sacrifice ! — like him who assuredly would 



252 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER III. 

have told the much anxious man to throw his pelf into the Thames, 
and free his soul from such perilous bondage. What relation can 
there be, you exclaim, between this thriving child of commerce 
and the great Spiritualist who walked the earth eighteen hundred 
years ago ? It is hypocrisy, it is delusion ! Expose him to the 
world, expose him to himself! Be not too hasty. This is the 
sole poetry, the only sentimentality of his life. The man comes 
home in the evening, and by his fireside, in his warm parlour, 
with his slippered feet upon the warm rug, and his very heart 
glowing with his gains, he reads to his gathered household — I 
have heard him — his favourite homily about the lilies of the field 
and the treasure that thieves cannot steal ! It is the poetry of 
his life. It did not lead him to renounce wealth ; it rather assisted 
him, in many indirect ways, to make it, — gave him patience, and 
perhaps that conjugal fidelity to a not very charming wife which 
has not a little promoted his success. But what would be the 
result if you were to strip him of this grand incongruity ? You 
would but extinguish what noble sentiment occasionally plays 
over the surface of his mind ; you would but toss him without 
reprieve from meal to meal, from his bed to his ledger, from gain 
to gluttony. 

THORNDALE. 

I certainly would not pillage him of any faith he may pos- 
sess. There is a spectacle I have witnessed in the streets of 
London that I like still better than this picture of your black- 
coated and tight-buttoned citizen. In a wooden stall or shed 
that opens on a level with the damp pavement, there sits some 
industrious cobbler. Apparently he is not too well rewarded 
for his labour, or he would obtain some better and cleaner abode. 
For though this stall, or stye, is open to the air, no current passes 
through it, and the most rapid pedestrian detects its thick and. 
noxious atmosphere. Nothing short of a hurricane could purify 
it. In this wooden box, his face on a level, with the feet of the 
rest of mankind, our cobbler stitches and hammers all day long. 
He has the ceaseless shuffle of feet before him on the pavement ; 
the carriage-wheels on the road beyond are liberal of their noise 
and their dirt ; and I suppose he finds but little to soothe him in 
the flow of that stream which keeps its unfragrant course along 



THE WORLD AS IT IS— OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 253 

the kennel. Six days in the week, and most hours of the day, 
you may see this man with his awl, and his waxed thread, and 
his lapstone, piercing and hammering the tough shoe-leather. 
That ceaseless shuffle of feet, that din of wheels, that flowing 
brooklet, form the scene in which he constantly lives. 

No, not constantly — not half his time. I look again into my 
cobbler's stall. I see lying on the bench beside him — he can 
snatch a word even as he works — his " Pilgrim's Progress," or 
his " Serious Call," or perhaps some deeper polemic. Our cob- 
bler, too, will flee from the city of destruction. That world 
which despises or forget-s his existence, he too can heartily 
despise and renounce. Those carriages, with all their paint 
and gilding, what are they to him ? They are carrying fools 
to perdition ; they are rolling smoothly on that broad highway 
on which, for all the world, he would not travel. All here is 
wretchedness and contempt ; no face smiles upon him ; but he 
will come soon to the borders of the river Jordan — some bright 
and flowing river over which he will pass — and on the other 
side are angels beaming with love, waiting to escort him where 
" crowns, and sceptres, and kingdoms," are but faint and bewild- 
ering types of the joy he will partake. 

SECKENDORF. 

And which anticipated joy does verily something towards 
" redressing the inequalities of wealth." I think philosophy and 
science would be very much perplexed to do for this cobbler 
what his Bunyan and his Baxter have done for him. Philoso- 
phy can only tell the man to stick to his last, and Science can 
only whisper this cold comfort into his ear, that, three centuries 
hence, new substitutes for shoe-leather may bring a new substi- 
tute for cobblers. 

But even highly educated, philosophical, or speculative men, 
do not always comprehend how large a portion of their intellec- 
tual lives they owe to popular creeds, which perhaps have 
existed for their minds, only to be canvassed, criticized, and 
finally rejected. Rejected they may be, but they have not the 
less occupied their thoughts. We may note that it has always 
been on this battle-field of theology — where, like the Titans of 



254 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER III. 

old, men have warred against gods they would not acknowledge 
— that our speculative ardour, and whatever there may be of 
heroic in thonglit, has been called forth. Doubt — the state of 
mind trembling between faith and denial — is full of emotion. 
Indeed the religious susceptibility is kept alive by doubt. Un- 
compromising denial has also its heroism, when it advances 
against numbers and a mythology still in the ascendant. But 
denial that has thrown its last spear at the last idol, could be a 
hero no longer. It has become by its own success the common- 
place of life. 

Were its victory complete, there would indeed be a common- 
place of life, such as the world has never yet seen. Wonder 
Avould have ceased ; reverence and mystery would have ceased ; 
where the classifications of science break off, there would be 
mere blank of knowledge, or phenomena not yet catalogued and 
arranged. The earth would exist for merely agricultural pur- 
poses, and our sky would be so many cubic feet of atmospheric 
air. Man, who — like the god Apis — was wont to pass now for 
a god and now for an ox, would know himself, once for all, 
to be veritable ox, and graze contentedly. The denouement is 
not interesting. 

CLARENCE. 

You describe very faithfully what a materialistic philosophy 
might bring us to — if such a philosophy could ever predominate. 

In such descriptions as you and Thorndale have given, and 
which you might easily multiply, I concur most cordially. I 
have a firm conviction that, by the very faculties which the 
Creator has bestowed on man, every social epoch will be found 
to bring forward the faith best suited to it. The Neapolitan 
fisherman and the English shoemaker have each of them a real 
genuine faith, and one which has great elements of truth in it. 
If they become more enlightened, the truths they believe will 
become more and more conspicuous, the error and the fable 
drop off. This is the only change I can anticipate. The Nea- 
politan will blend with his worship a higher morality, and the 
Englishman shall retain his hope of a glorious immortality, with- 
out the contempt or bitterness he must be excused for feehng 



THE WORLD AS IT IS— OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 255 

it 
aspect. 



agfainst a world that does not turn to him its most amiable 



SECKENDORF. 

Clarence must have both ideals — his terrestrial and his celes- 
tial Utopia — and he will not see that the two are incompatible. 

It is a matter of fact, not of conjecture, of history, of daily 
observation, that man's faith in a future life grows out of the 
wrongs and affliction of his earthly career. What philosophers 
have talked of the immortality of the soul, or of divine " ecstasy," 
or of the contrast between the eternal and permanent and this 
changeful and time-begotten life — is a mere afterthought. The 
bulk of mankind have believed in a future life, because they 
have believed in a future judgment ; because great criminals had 
departed from the world unpunished ; because their own days 
were passing away, and no felicity had been realized. You 
imagine a time when there are no wrongs, and few sorrows, and 
you still expect tliis faith to survive. 

Do you think that the belief in immortality could last a 
moment if stated as a bare fact of natural philosophy ? 

There lies a dead man ! Nature does not revive that dead 
man. She has a quite different plan. She makes another. He 
is already here. The living son is carrying the dead father to 
his last rest. 

You put out a man's eyes and he no longer sees ; you damage 
his brain, and he no longer remembers ; you kill him outright, and 
he is supposed to start up all sight and all memory ! Confess 
this does not wear the air of probability. 

But what is probability, or the course of nature, or the clear- 
est testimony of our senses, against a passion-begotten faith ! 
The strong desire, the untamable wish, the irresistible fear, 
these are the masters of our belief. The senses themselves are 
feeble when opposed to them. 

When a creed is here amongst us — given us by tradition and 
the people — philosophers play with it as they list, and mould it 
to their taste. Let the popular passion die out, and what would 
become of the philosophic creed ? It happens, however — happily 
or unhappily — that our passions, our wants, our griefs, are pre- 



256 . BOOK IV.— CHAPTER III. 

cisely the most permanent things in human life. Nor is there 
any class of men entirely exempt from them. 

You delight to speak, Clarence, of the ideas of the Few ex- 
tending to the Many. You forget the constant and most potent 
influence of the Many over the Few. I do not find that scientific 
men, as a body, have any peculiarity in their religious opinions. 
And most assuredly any departure from the popular creed which 
you find in this or that individual, is no proof of his greater in- 
telligence or wider knowledge. Generally speaking, the man is 
less amiable, less conscientious, than others, not more able, more 
intellectually strong. 

CLARENCE. 

Nowhere, in all the wide range of our many controversies, do 
I so entirely differ from you as in this — that the progress of 
science, and of the scientific mode of thinking, has a tendency to 
destroy our belief in immortality. I am convinced that here 
the science of the latest age will be found to be in perfect har- 
mony with the imagination of the earliest. Humanity is one 
whole, and develops itself under the God of Truth. But if you, 
Seckendorf, think otherwise, if you have persuaded yourself that 
science is incompatible with this faith — to you I say that, never- 
theless, you ought to advance the cause of science and of intel- 
lectual progress. Say that man has only this life to live, surely 
he should live it to the best of his power — live it with Truth for 
his companion, and not delusion. 

What a strange position is it that you take up ! I am not to 
believe in Heaven because it is a dream of the imagination ; 
and I am not to believe in terrestrial progress because this will 
dissipate the dream. The belief in immortality is a proof of the 
childhood of the human race ; then if I speculate upon its ad- 
vancing manhood, I am told that this manhood would be a hard, 
melancholy, impoverished existence. But let us have our^man- 
hood at all events. And whatever that manhood may be, it will 
surely come. 

SECKENDORF. 

Che sara sara, as one of your nobility bears upon his shield. 



THE WORLD AS IT IS— OUR FAITHS AS THEY ARE. 257 

I will bear the same motto upon mine. I am not alarmed, I 
assure you, at any possible achievement of science or philos- 
ophy. I strongly suspect that faiths which spring from the 
Unknown, looked at through our own miseries and craving de- 
sires, will outlast any thing we have yet attained of scientific 
knowledge. But I am prepared for either fate. Nature will 
protect her own : she will be at all times in harmony with her- 
self. If I have little faith in progress, I can contemplate with- 
out dismay the inevitable change and mutability that character- 
ize our world. I am no prophet, as you are, Clarence, nor care 
to make proselytes to my own way of thinking. I am rather 
pleased to contemplate the vast variety of opinions, feelings, 
sentiments. 

I have not taken upon myself to remodel the world upon my 
own convictions. There has been always room in this varied 
scene for a Democritus or an Anaxagoras ; he, too, I suppose, 
had his part to play in it. To me it seems that the difficulty we 
have in dealing with subjects that affect human society results 
from the extreme complexity and variety of this same human 
society. We cannot embrace it. What we see is never the 
whole. Hence, to our apprehensions, its incurable contradiction. 
The chaos is in our own minds ; no doubt of that. There can be 
but one chaos, that of the limited understanding. 

CLARENCE. 

Most true ! most true ! But our hopes lie precisely here — 
that our limited understanding extends its hmits. The same 
power that created, is enlarging our intelligence. Thus the 
only chaos is slowly giving way to order and a complete unity. 
Order, truth, enlargement of comprehension, are but synonymous 
terms. 

SECKENDORF. 

To me it seems that it is one of the conditions of this crea- 
ture, man — from the development of whose reason you expect so 
much — that he should be always in a maze of mystery and igno- 
rance. The more of the labyrinth he explores, the wider and 
more intricate does the labyrinth become. The answer to one 



258 BOOK IV.-CHAPTER HI. 

question brings forward another, and another question, still more 
difficult of solution. For practical purposes we gather some- 
thing from this or that science — something that converts to food 
and clothing, pleasure or occupation — but science itself, that in- 
tellectual view which embraces the whole of things, is utterly 
unattainable. Science, as an intelligible whole, is a mere de- 
lusion. It is an impossible aim leading along endless tracts of 
labour. A countryman who should start upon a journey to the 
horizon, would have as much hope of reaching some definite end 
of his pilgrimage. 

We must all reason to the best of our power in the age and 
generation in which we live. We have something we call 
knowledge, and some rules, and methods, or maxims of scientific 
investigation — and with these we must work, or he idle as dogs. 
But what thinking man — who is not the mere puppet of some 
sing-song of his day — has not felt, at times, the sad uncertainty 
of all his knowledge — has not felt that posterity may reverse all 
his decrees? What we call scientific methods, and universal 
maxims, are built upon special knowledge in this and that depart- 
ment of science. Hardly anything is safe. — It is life that is the 
end of life, not truth. 

THORNDALE. 

If science is a delusion, it is one at least which you yourself 
have not renounced; for you still prosecute it, and not without 
result. 

SECKENDORF. 

Whilst I live I must think. Such is the nature of some of us. 
Just as this poor mutilated centipede that is crawling upon Clar- 
ence's table must still continue to crawl as long as any vitality 
remains to it. See, it is but half a centipede, and yet it crawls 
on, and now I place this book upright in its way, and it thrusts 
its headless body against the barrier. It cannot advance, and 
yet continues in every leg the old action of walking. Mere con- 
tact of the surface it treads on, stimulates the now useless foot. 
Well, there are more of us than this mutilated centipede who 
keep walking, though we make no way. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INN ON THE RIGHI — SECKENDORF RECOUNTS AN 
INCIDENT IN HIS OWN BIOGRAPHY. 

"We three made together the usual excursion to the summit of 
the Righi. "We slept at the inn that stands there in its solitary 
elevation, in order that we might see the sun rise the next 
morning over the mountains. Like many other tourists, we 
were disappointed. Morning came, but no sun. We found 
ourselves enveloped in a thick and drenching mist. In fact we 
were in the centre of a cloud, and one that gave no signs of dis- 
persing. Consultation was held. Should we descend the moun- 
tain ? Should we remain and take the chance of another sun- 
rise ? "We were in possession of a sitting-room with an enor- 
mous German stove — a square pile of green crockery ware that 
half filled the apartment — and, moreover, supplied with no 
scanty collection of books in all languages. "We determined to 
spend the day in this sort of imprisonment. The books were 
very little used. As soon as one of us had got upon a chair to 
examine the shelves of the library, another was sure to ask what 
discovery he had made, or he would himself immediately begin 
to talk about the book he had found instead of reading it. In 
short, they only served to start some new topic of conversation. 

The cloud enclosed us the whole of the day ; you could see 
absolutely nothing. If you opened the window for an instant, 
a cold driving mist entered that very soon satisfied your curi- 
osity. "We were rewarded, however, for our perseverance ; for 
on the following morning the sun rose in full splendour, and we 
were witnesses to a spectacle such as never forsakes the memory 
of those who have been fortunate enough to see it to advantage. 

I have said we were rewarded for our perseverance ; but, for 



260 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER IV. 

my own part, I have passed few more delightful days than this 
which was spent in fast imprisonment in the inn on the Righi. 
Never did a dinner-party go off with greater spirit than ours ; 
and when evening, and the coffee came, (always the propitious 
moment with Seckendorf,) our Baron, or Doctor, by whichever 
name he ought to be called, became most frank, cordial, and 
communicative. It was on this occasion that he gave us some 
insight into his early history. The conversation which ushered 
in this personal confidence rolled upon some of our old topics of 
philosophical discussion. Seckendorf took the lead. 

SECKENDORF. 

When I was a student at Berlin, Kant was our great meta- 
physical authority. I am not surprised (let me say by the way 
of parenthesis) at the supreme sway he obtained at one time, or 
the brevity of that sway. He gratified at once two opposite 
tendencies — the love of critical examination, and the desire for 
a steadfast belief. Those who delight in the destructive exercise 
of the analytic faculty, could find all they wanted in the Critique 
of the Pure Reason ; those who demanded from philosophy a 
basis whereon to rest some cherished faith, moral or religious, 
found what they sought for in the commodious doctrine of the 
Practical Reason. But two such opposite factions could not 
long be held under the same banner. The system of Kant was 
rent in two. Some never forgot that chapter on what are called 
the " amphibologies " of the speculative reason. Others clung 
with tenacity to the " category imperative," and that astounding 
expedient for saving the freedom of the will, the introduction of 
the mysterious " noumenon," or being in itself. The intellect, 
which is cognizant only of phenomena and their laws, judges all 
things as under the dominion of law. In the will the "nou- 
menon " reveals itself to our consciousness ; and the noumenon, 
or being in itself, is not in space or in time, and therefore not 
under the laws of phenomena. From which admirable and 
lucid exposition, it follows that we must always feel ourselves 
free, and think ourselves bound or subject to the meaner laws of 
space and time. 

Such profundities I also studied, not without a certain share 



THE INN ON THE EIGHI. ^1 

of enthusiasm, though with a dim obscure feehng, even while 
I was laying clown my dogmas most earnestlj, that I did not 
quite understand myself. 

It happened that a citizen of Berlin, noted for his wretched 
and violent temper, finally ended his career by blowing out his 
brains. He chose a sentry-box in the public street for the 
scene of this exploit. Though life was extinct, the people nev- 
ertheless carried him into the hospital. I was passing at the 
time. I had some little knowledge of the man, and, mingling 
with the medical students, I entered with them into the hospital. 
The man was quite dead, and a post-mortem examination ensued. 
An eminent physician, passing through the room just as the 
operators were commencing their work, said, as he hurried on to 
some pressing avocation of his own, " Look under the dura 
mater, and see if there are not some osseous deposits." The 
operator did not fail to look, and lo ! there were osseous deposits, 
" evidently," as they all pronounced, " of a very irritating sort." 

I was struck with this incident, both because of the certainty 
and precision of the physician's knowledge, and because of the 
palpable cause here discovered of the violent and ungovernable 
temper of the unhappy man. I thought that the temper of 
some other men I knew would be a little more intelligible if 
one could only look under their dura mater. I passed in review 
several of my friends ; — did not quite forget myself ; — perhaps 
here also, I said, are osseous deposits of a very irritating sort. 

On the next day I betook myself to a medical librarj^ Of 
course the first book I seized upon was a treatise upon the brain. 
I soon after, however, settled down into a regular course of anat- 
omy and physiology. Here, for the first time, did I feel, when 
talking about man, something like firm ground beneath my feet. 
Fool that I had been, I said to myself, to hope to understand this 
human and reasoning being by sifting and resifting the last verbal 
proposition he enunciates in the schools, instead of beginning with 
the simple facts which my very senses can testify for me. I laid 
aside for the present my investigations into Being and Cause and 
Power, and resolved to learn whatever could be learnt of a muscle, 
of a nerve, of an organ of sense. I felt I had been losing myself 
in a vicious method. 



262 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER IV. 

CLARENCE. 

And you burnt your metaphysics ? 

SECKENDORF. 

Not exactly. But I studied physiology. I entered with great 
zest into my new labours. I embraced the whole circle of a 
medical education. Out of mere vanity, or a species of bravado, 
I took my doctor's degree. Very far indeed from me at that 
time, was the notion of really entering this learned profession, 
and somewhat curious the incident that led to so unforeseen a 
result. But that is quite beside our question. 

CLARENCE. 

If it is not an "indiscretion," as the French say, to make such 
a request, I should like very much to know what the incident 
was that transformed you, a German Baron, with his sixteen 
quarters, into an English physician. 

SECKENDORF. 

Well, if it will at all interest you, you shall hear how a " baron 
bold," wealthy enough, and proud enough, was transformed into 
the somewhat eccentric physician I have the reputation of being, 
And, Clarence, you shall inoralize the event. Make of it an illus- 
tration — if you can — of that predominance of the Intellect over 
the Passions on which you count so much. 

The temperament of a man, the blood that is in him, is apt, I 
suspect, to overrule his philosophy. If this thinking faculty of 
mine had been lodged in some slender, feeble shred of a body 
— all nerve and sensibility — I should have doubtless taken, once 
for all, to books and meditation, and laboured, perhaps — I also — 
to obtain the reputation of a philosopher. But only measure me ! 
— {and Sechendorf, laughing at his oivn idea, stood up at his full 
height) — I stand six feet some inches, the naked heel resting on 
the mother earth. Age has narrowed and rounded in my shoul- 
ders ; but there was a time when I could have borne off a pro- 
fessor of philosophy upon each one of them. I had the thews 
and sinews of a tiger ; I could have endured fatigue with a North 
American savage ; I have fasted for three days, and then fed like 



THE INN ON THE RIGHI. 263 

a boa-constrictor. Was this the digestion for a philosopher ? 
Was this the organization for one who asks nothing of material 
nature but a headpiece to think with, and so much animal mech- 
anism as goes to the moving of a pen ? I could for wrecks together 
spend the whole day, and much of the night, in indefatigable study. 
Then would follow a craving for physical excitement, an appetite 
for action, quite irrepressible. I would then ride the fleetest 
horses urged to their utmost speed ; or I would repair to the 
fencing-school. The use of every weapon was familiar to me, 
but the sword and the foil were my favourites. The energetic 
contest of man with man, some sort of fighting, believe me, 
comes very natural to the human animal. Foot to foot, eye on 
eye, stroke on stroke, there is no excitement like the combat. 

I was rich — I was noble ; there was but one career that 
seemed appropriate to me. I, who had gone the round of scien- 
tific education, left my science, my learning, my metaphysics, my 
physiology, to buckle a sabre at my side and fight at the bidding 
of another ! To be sure, I had the dear Fatherland to fight for. 
There was a crusade on foot against foreign domination. I was 
not w^ithout some sort of Madonna to sanction the old hereditary 
instinct for w^ar. 

My commanding officer was a prince of the blood, which did 
not prevent him from being a man of very weak understanding. 
I had a very sincere contempt for him ; and probably, in some 
way, made this sufficiently evident. I despised him, and he de- 
tested me. I was not in general popular with my fellow officers. 
They were for the most part empty-headed, and much like great 
boys. I could not always conceal my derision. Of course I was 
in a very weak minority in my quarrel with the general. 

The disputes that occur in a camp or a barrack — questions 
about drill or parade — you will not care to hear, nor I to recall. 
Suffice it, that on one occasion a controversy arose between me 
and my princely general. Some sarcastic word of mine stung 
him to the quick, and having no answer ready in speech, he 
clenched his fist, and struck at me. Some officers of the regi- 
ment who were standing by instantly interposed. To make 
peace, and hush the matter up, they all declared that no blow 
had actually been struck — that the Prince's arm had fallen short, 



264 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER IV. 

that the hand had not really touched me. The sycophants ! 
When my back was turned they would have gloated over the 
indignity I had sustained. They declared that no blow had been 
struck — / had felt it. His hand had touched me, — say rather it 
had burnt. An infant's hand could hardly have given a slighter 
blow ; — a feather driven by the wind against my breast would 
have inflicted as great an injury ; — an adder's fang could not 
have left a more deadly wound. Indeed, it rankled as if some 
poison had been suddenly diffused through my veins ; it stung 
me to rage, it roused all the tiger nature in me. 

Then and there, of course, nothing could be done. I retired 
in silence. I received no apology, and I asked for none. 

At the time I am speaking of, we Germans were engaged in 
our last war with France. Our regiment was stationed at some 
paltry town on the frontier, whose name I forget. We had been 
kept inactive there for some time, and our prince-general occu- 
pied his evenings in visiting a cottage in the suburbs, where he 
had found, or to which he had brought, some frail damsel or 
other. The matter had never interested me a moment, nor the 
gossip to which it gave occasion ; but now it flashed upon me 
that this circumstance would favour my revenge. 

To challenge my superior officer, and that in time of war, 
would have been idle ; he would have refused to fight, and that 
with perfect propriety. But I miglit encounter him alone by the 
river-side, and, man to man, compel him to fight. When the 
evening came I sallied forth, selecting a circuitous route by which 
I should intercept him. I took two rapiers under my arm, of 
precisely the same length, that no want of j^roper tools should 
baulk my intelligent purpose. Thus provided, I salhed forth. 

Here, then, was I — very profound philosopher, informed in 
many sciences, much accustomed to the subtlest analyses of 
human thought and motive — thrown into an ungovernable rage 
by a touch upon the epidermis, which a child would hardly have 
felt, Mdiicli it required all the sensitiveness of pride and honour 
to be conscious of. But I was then wholly given up to passion ? 
Was I altogether incapable of reflection? Had all my old 
habits of introverted thought and self-examination deserted me ? 
Not so. I perfectly remember that I was reasoning at every 



THE INN ON THE EIGHI. 



2^ 



step I took. I was proving to myself at every step how utterly 
mad and absurd a purpose I was bent upon. I reasoned, but I 
walked on. " A mere blow ! " I said to myself, " and of the 
very slightest ! For this blood must be shed — life taken ! In- 
sanity ! " But I never slackened my pace. " Honour ! my 
honour wounded ! He who gives an unmerited blow, is the dis- 
honoured man — or ought to be. He who receives one, has but 
to i^ardon or disdain." Incomparable sentiment! Irrefutable 
logic ! I tossed it to and fro, as one tosses a staff from hand to 
hand, and strode on none the less rapidly for the exercise. 

" 1 shall kill him ! " I said to myself. " I shall kill this man ; 
I am the better swordsman. We call it battle, combat, fair duel ; 
nothing but the merest accident can save him. He is brave, but 
I am braver. He is strong and skilful, but I am stronger and 
more skilful. I shall strike him dead — and I mean it. And 
for a blow ! " But, even as I repeated that word " blow," my 
cheek flushed with rekindled anger ; I feU again that foul touch 
of another's clenched hand upon my breast, foul, revolting, in- 
tolerable. " He struck ! It cannot be helped. It is nature's 
law. Everywhere the blow brings on the combat." 

So reasoning, and so marching — reasoning this way and that, 
but marching straight on without a pause — I met my adversary. 
We fought. He did not want courage. I slew him. He lay 
dead at my feet. 

CLARENCE. 

And then you took flight ? 

SECKENDORF. 

It is what I should have done ; but I stood rooted to the spot. 
Reflection now — when she could be only a hindrance — gained the 
complete ascendency. Wisdom now had it all to herself. What 
a text for meditation lay before me ! 

Suddenly a female figure rushed past me, and threw herself 
upon the body of my late antagonist. Oh, what a shriek was 
that ! With what a poignant remorse it filled my whole soul ! 
It utterly unnerved me. When one of a picquet of soldiers 
touched my shoulder to arrest me, I, who three minutes before 

12 



266 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER IV. 

would have madly fought against a whole battalion, yielded 
quietly, and surrendered my sword. 

When you consider the breach of military discipline I had 
committed, the rank of the man who had fallen, the desire of 
his successor to show his zeal in revenging him, and my own 
unpopularity amongst my fellow-officers, you will see that my 
fate was sealed. A court-martial, as you would designate it, 
passed sentence of death upon me. — I have had experience, 
Clarence, of that hour men pass, Avhen, full to the last of life, 
they walk onwards to their death. 

CLARENCE. 

It is an hour which I have often tried to imagine. Nature, 
in her own kind way, either gives no time for much reflection, 
hurries us off in some fit of pain or passion, or else she first 
takes away the love of life before she takes life itself. This 
terrible artificiality, this cold and sudden death, pronounced, 
plotted, executed with official routine and exactness — this in- 
tense thought marching onward to lay thought down — has al- 
ways struck me as amongst the most astounding things of human 
life. 

SECKENDORF. 

Nature is with us here too. Some men the blow stuns ; in 
others the very intensity of thought which such an hour calls up, 
acts like the anguish of a wound. I remember a wild dizzy 
intolerable confusion of many thoughts. If I stepped quietly 
along the greensward, I nevertheless felt like one who is walk- 
ing in a whirlwind. 

I, and a French prisoner, a detected spy, were led out to- 
gether to the trenches to be shot. They had united me with 
this prisoner as an additional indignity. 

I must mention a little incident touching my companion, 
because it produced a delay to which I partly owe my escape. 
He was a very little man. He was only too brave. He abso- 
lutely strutted to his death ; a demeanour which struck me as 
rather too heroic for the occasion. For me, as I walked those 
few steps, every train of speculartive thought I ever had in my 



THE INN ON THE RIGHI. 267 

life, seemed to be rushing through my mind ; and to the lively- 
Frenchman my deportment doubtless appeared too sad and 
despondent. " Courage ! " he exclaimed ; " the eyes of Europe 
are upon us ! " " Eyes of Europe ! " I muttered ; " we shall be 
as two dogs buried in a ditch — go quietly to kennel." I had 
not the least thought of wounding the man's feelings. But he 
was outrageously indignant at what he called my insulting lan- 
guage. With tears streaming from his eyes, he implored the 
soldiers who had guard over us to give him a little respite — I 
had bitterly insulted him — only five minutes of life, that he 
might do mortal combat for his honour. 

The soldiers laughed at his clamorous petition. I was an- 
noyed. But the delay was fortunate. Just as they had suc- 
ceeded in pacifying the Frenchman, the cry was raised that the 
enemy was on us ! A panic spread through the whole camp. 
The party of soldiers who were to be our executioners, thought 
only of their own safety. We were permitted to escape in the 
confusion. Though unpopular with the officers, I was a favourite 
of the men ; and it has since occurred to me that they lent them- 
selves very readily to the panic. I heard the word of command 
given to follow us, but it was not obeyed ; they tied as if the 
Frenchman's bayonet was upon them. 

CLARENCE. 

I hope you had not to fight with the little Frenchman. 

SECKENDOKF. 

No, no. He ran one way and I another. The natural course, 
I suppose, of a person in my position, would have been to offer 
his sword at the military courts of Austria or Russia. But I 
was sick of the sword. I thought of Switzerland — I thought of 
England. What trivial motives often turn the scale in what 
seems the most momentous crisis of our lives ! I could speak 
the English language, and had never been in England. I de- 
cided upon England. 

CLARENCE. 

But after an interval, could you not return to your own coun- 
try ? It was, after all, fair duel. 



268 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER IV. 

SECKENDORF. 

My offence was unpardonable. Besides, my lands had been 
confiscated, and had fallen into the hands of some courtier, who 
would not have wished to see me again at Berlin. Thus much 
my friends were able to obtain, that, so long as I did not set foot 
on the territory of Prussia, no inquiries should be made after 
me. 

But with his lands confiscated, how was a German Baron to 
live in London ? That degree of Doctor of Medicine, which I 
had taken out of mere bravado, came to my rescue. I applied 
myself again to my old and favourite studies. I wrote a book. 
How I lived while the book was being written, shall perhaps 
one day be told you for your edification. My book brought me 
patients. And lo ! the transformation complete ! 

CLARENCE. 

Not altogether complete ; for our learned physician sometimes 
becomes again the " Baron bold," and he has been known sud- 
denly to decamp, and fly half over Europe and Asia before he 
has returned and settled again in his comfortable house in 
London. 

SECKENDORF. 

And now, Clarence, you shall moralize the tale. Have I not 
given a fair illustration of the manner in which passion still rules 
predominant over intellect ? 

CLARENCE. 

I have been too much interested in the history itself to think 
what it might fitliest illustrate. But if I really am " to point the 
tale," I see in it a striking example of the manner in which a 
given state of public opinion tells upon our passions, and I press 
your narrative into an argument for our moral progress ; for it 
was the state of public opinion with regard to duelling, and to 
that stigma supposed to be cast upon a man who receives a blow, 
which developed the peculiar form of passion or revenge which 
actuated you. If this transaction were to take place now, such 
has been the change already made, within the life of one man, in 



THE INN ON THE RIGHI. 269 

public opinion on these matters, that you would not have the 
same feelings of revenge or hostility aroused in you. Men, in 
cold blood, form more rational opinions on this subject, and these 
control and modify the passionate man himself. Thus a moral 
progress is effected. In truth, Seckendorf, when I consider it, 
I ought to feel obliged to you for the admirable illustration you 
have thrown in my way of one kind of progressive movement. 

SECKENDORF. 

Well, we will leave the illustration alone ; I have no wish to 
dwell longer upon it. Let us forget the duel of swords and 
pistols, and carry on our own more peaceful duel. I will not — O 
thou prince of artists, and most Quixotic of philosophers ! — truly 
an artist-philosopher — I will not play with illustrations, but I will 
suggest to you certain strict limits to that moral and religious 
progress you vaunt so much. To Nature's progress or develop- 
ment, in an altogether unknown future, I set no limits ; I neither 
pretend to foresee or to limit that augmentation of all life — that 
creative increase, which some have thought to be the law of our 
world. I deal only with the ideal progress you present to me. 
And I say the very causes you invoke to speed you on this pro- 
gress, act, in a double manner, against as well as for you. The 
progressive development of society brings with it increased 
variety of individual characters and opinions, and I need not say 
it is unanimity of opinion which gives the maximum power to 
the moral sentiment. And in rehgion, just in proportion as you 
refine, humanize, and intellectualize your creed, do you weaken 
its influence on our hopes and fears. 



CHAPTER V. 

SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS, AND THE LIMITS 
TO MORAL AND RELIGIOUS PROGRESS. 

CLARENCE. 

But you surely cannot deny that man has progressed. You 
cannot deny the past, whatever you may believe, or refuse to 
believe, of the future. As a man of science, you cannot deny 
that the history of our whole world manifests a process of devel- 
opment, and that the history of the human species does so in an 
especial and most remarkable manner. As a man of science, 
you must allow that, if the same species continues to exist, it 
will continue to develop. 

SECKENDORF. 

Ad infinitum — eh ? But if you appeal to science, you must 
be bound by science. If you find that human nature develops 
itself from age to age, you have no right to conclude that it will 
develop itself m any other fashion or manner than it has hitherto 
done. Development, according to your account, is the normal 
state of this creature. It puts forth a fuller and more varied 
life. Well, then, imagine in the future (if you can imagine what 
does not yet exist) a life still more complex, still more varied. 
But as you have hitherto had a simultaneous development of good 
and evil, (or what we are accustomed to call such,) what other 
anticii^ation have you a right to form than that there will be still 
further development of both good and evil ? A community in 
which there should be a still greater variety in individual devel- 
opment, would lead us to anticipate still greater diversity of con- 
duct, and of opinion on social and moral subjects. 

The path of progress is the path of life. If it has been rug- 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 271 

ged and tortuous hitherto, why should it not continue to be 
rugged and tortuous ? War and conquest have been, and still 
are, the great agents in civilizing the world. Famine has driven 
the race over the face of the earth, and is still doing so. The 
surplus population, as it is politely called, of the more advanced 
and prosperous nations, are exterminating the weaker and less 
progressive races — red, black, tawney, yellow, and the like. 

Man does not put forth his blossoms exactly like the lily and 
the rose. What you call his development is a very turbulent 
business. The stream of life runs broader, fuller — not purer or 
more peacefully. The last novelty, the last development that 
history will have to record of these our times is, that we have 
added ^o war and civil discord the charming variety of revolu- 
tion. This is the last bud or blossom that you have to point to. 
Our tree of life has produced this amongst its other novelties. 
I ask you on what possible grounds can you predict a time when 
it is to put forth none but good fruit, or what you are pleased to 
call such ? Permit a physiologist to remark, that when we 
speak of the development of any species, we do not imply a 
complete departure from the type. 

CLAKENCE. 

Sometimes nothing so much assists us in explaining our own 
views as the opposition of a keen antagonist. I readily admit 
that our idea of development is that of fuller and more varied 
life ; but this is only one half the truth — the fuller life is also 
the better life. Here it is, oh Seckendorf, that your philosophy 
so egregiously fails. You see that throughout nature there is 
development ; you see that in man, not only is the individual a 
more complex being, but society becomes more complex from 
the developed varieties amongst these individual men. But you 
have not grasped the truth that this progressive development is 
but the progressive manifestation of the Divine Idea, or the 
great whole. More and fuller life is a nearer approximation to 
the complete whole ; in which complete whole every part becomes 
itself more exalted by reason of the increased relationships it has. 
If I begin a sketch, and put down upon the paper a church Iiere 
and a windmill there, they look crude enough; except that they 



272 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

are on the same paper, they seem to have no relationship to each 
other. But as I fill in the rest of the picture, not only do I put 
more objects on the paper, but my church and my windmill are 
related to all these new objects, and now harmonize together in 
a quite novel manner. Fuller life is better life ; development 
is progress, because that whole is being developed in which 
every part becomes raised, and exalted, and harmonious. 

SECKENDORF. 

I must allow that you know more of the Divine Idea, and of 
the hitherto undeveloped whole, than I do. Limiting myself to 
that half of the truth which you compliment me on knowing 
something about, I see a process of the following kind going on 
in the human species. More numerous arts are practised — 
greater knowledge is obtained ; but these arts, this knowledge, 
become individuoUzed in certain men. In a very rude state of 
society one man may be an epitome of all men; but just as 
development proceeds does diversity increase between man and 
man, and we are now accustomed to say that the greatest of men 
shrink into littleness when placed beside Humanity. Now, this 
greater variety of individual character, brought about by the 
variety of arts, of occupation, of knowledge, points to a fuller 
life ; but how do you find in it any indication of that moral per- 
fection of society, or that perfect whole, and that better life, that 
you delight to prophesy ? The very nature of things suggests 
a limit to moral progress. If you have few rules of conduct, 
and all men are agreed upon them, you have the maximum of 
obedience. The old Persians, if indeed they limited their code 
to the virtue of telling truth, would very rigidly enforce this rule 
amongst themselves. He who did not tell truth would be at 
once stigmatized. But if there is a very complex life, and many 
rules of conduct, you have — 1. Diversity of judgment, weaken- 
ing the force of opinion ; and, 2. You liave many rules of con- 
duct to enforce, and the man who has broken one may yet have 
obeyed others. Men are now of very mixed characters : their 
faults get pardoned for their virtues, and the opprobrium of pub- 
lic opinion no longer ffiUs with the same pitiless decision. That 
very complexity of human society which constitutes your progress, 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE *0F PROGRESS. 273 

is limiting and restricting that force of opinion on which you 
are counting for a i^erfect morality. 

I indeed am not discontented with such world as we have, bat 
I certainly cannot see that Divine Idea which is to be fulfilled in 
the future. This thick mist which now envelops us, as we sit 
perched here on the summit of the Righi, is no bad emblem of 
the sort of prospect that we get when we are bent upon looking 
out into the future. 

CLARENCE. 

Wait till to-raorrow morning at sunrise, and we shall have, 
upon this Righi, I hope, a much better emblem. 

SECKENDORF. 

Meanwhile, if we could ascend such a mountain as your poet 
speaks of, one from which all the kingdoms of the earth could 
be descried, with all their polities, religion, laws, and customs, is 
it a very encouraging spectacle that would be revealed to us ? 
How read you the " Signs of the Times ? " Where do you see 
great moral, political, religious advancement ? If the kingdoms 
of the earth were spread out before me, should I see despotism 
everywhere retiring, and yielding the ground to self-governing 
communities ? Should I see the churches and priesthoods of 
Christendom rehnquishing their old task of governing men by 
imaginary terrors ? Should I see anywhere a populace that 
could be safely manumitted from such a government ? Should 
I see our great rehgious teachers aiming to discover truth for 
themselves and others, or still ruling the world — and contented, 
and compelled to rule the world — by whatever dogma is already 
accredited ? — themselves bound down as much by this necessity 
to govern, as the populace by their need of government. What 
are the signs of moral advancement that I should behold ? Does 
not poverty in all its most hideous forms still exist in London 
and in Paris ? Man takes no measure of his wants, and his 
own power to supply them — lives and multiplies like any beast 
of the field : whole classes amongst us rub on, as they call it, 
from day to day. Intelligence never visits them, or it makes its 
appearance as some new development of villany. Tal^e the 
13* 



274 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

whole national life : Has war ceased ? will there be no more 
battles and sieges ? Are all homes happy ? Has the domestic 
war ceased ? Are tears, and anger, and spite no more seen or 
heard in the very regions which the poets fill with love ? 

Two years ago, a democratic movement shook most of the 
thrones of Europe. Was this in the programme of your devel- 
opment ? Was this the " march of intellect ? " If so, there has 
been a countermarch. As I read this last chapter in our his- 
tory, wealth took the alarm at certain prophetic announcements 
oT ' social progress,' of ' equitable reorganization,' and threw her 
weight upon the side of monarchy. Wealth enlisted the des- 
pot ; wealth reenlisted and exalted the priest. Men, to save 
themselves from your philanthropic regeneration, sacrificed polit- 
ical liberty and intellectual liberty : they submitted to imperial 
government, and shuffled on in haste the cloak of hypocrisy. 

England is almost the only country of Europe that at this 
moment can boast of republican institutions (for the government 
of England is practically a republic under the forms of mon- 
archy) ; but how long is she likely to retain this distinction ? 
Some little time ago I beheld paraded through the streets of 
London an enormous banner, followed by a multitude of Chart- 
ists. On this purple banner, and in letters of gold, one might 
read the motto — " A fair day's wages for a fair day's work." A 
more modest motto, you will say, was never displayed in purple 
and gold. A more impossible demand was never made. No 
legislative power on earth could give them their fair day's wages 
for their fair day's work. They must look after that matter, 
each one for himself. Nay, if Parliament, in her " omnipo- 
tence," should settle what shall be a fair day's work and a fair 
day's wages. Parliament must next consult the gods and mother 
earth to know if these recognize the tariiF. Your work and 
your wages are finally settled — somewhere out of Parliament. 
But now, if this clamour rises, if this motto becomes a popular 
faith, then wealth in England will also take the alarm. Wealth 
here also will enlist the monarch ; — the pageant, and the forms, 
and the very theory of monarchical government, have all been 
faithfully preserved; — wealth here, also, will take shelter in 
imperial government, will renounce its free Parliament and its 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 275 

free press, and keep the private purse untouched. Wealth here, 
also, will exalt the priest still higher, and bow still lower to the 
Church, if by any means it can raise a power that will hold the 
multitude in check. 

I said a moment ago that Revolution had been the latest pro- 
duct of society. But I am reminded that there is another later 
still, and a favourite of the English soil — what you call strikes of 
your working population. Possibly good may come out of these 
combinations ; they teach men their power, but in their immedi- 
ate effect they have all the evils, in a mitigated form, of a politi- 
cal revolution. Probably the enmity they occasion lasts longer, 
though it is less violent. 

And pray tell me, Clarence, you who have studied the signs 
of the times, and should know your own countrymen better 
than I do, is it one amongst the symptoms of intellectual pro- 
gress that there is a movement in England towards the Roman 
Catholic Church ? Is this movement at all connected with some 
political movement, some monarchical tendency ? Does it result 
from pure love of truth and the spirit of inquiry ? I, who was 
brought up in the great Catholic Church, have my partialities 
towards her, and might not be the fittest judge. How do you 
read this matter ? To me it seems not improbable that that 
ragged urchin who is chalking up, " No Popery " on the walls 
of London, may live to see High Mass performed in St. Paul's 
Cathedral. He himself will be kneeling, an old man, bare- 
headed, on the pavement, to be sprinkled by the holy water as 
priests pass by in gorgeous procession, bearing the immaculate 
Virgin on their shoulders. Half your clergy, half your aristoc- 
racy, and every idle woman, are already ours. Every infidel, 
who loves music better than sermonizing, is already ours. All 
who love pomp and sentiment better than perplexing dogmas, 
will welcome the change. As to the mob, we know of old how 
they are to be converted. The good Moslems knew and prac- 
tised the art long ago. Not always is the sword necessary. 
The Muezzin ascends the tower and calls to prayer ; the people 
pelt him with stones ; he ascends again, and calls still louder, 
and the people throw fewer stones ; he still ascends, still calls, 
and the people drop their stones from their hands, and fall upon 



276 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

their knees. There is but one body in England from whom a 
stout resistance may be expected. The Dissenters will not con- 
vert. The descendants of the old Puritans — the republicans in 
religion — will stand out to the last. They will not convert, but 
they will hum ; they are combustible. And if an age too fastidi- 
ous rejects the aid of fire even in so great an emergency, there 
are your colonies — they can be transported. England, puri- 
fied from their presence, will again be embraced in the One 
Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. If I am a little too 
sanguine here, you must attribute it to the bias of early educa- 
tion. 

CLARENCE. 

I cannot tell how far you are serious, Seckendorf. If the 
first part of your melancholy prophecy should come true, and 
England should sink under a military or despotic government — 
should lose her liberty of free printing and free speaking — then 
indeed she may sink also into a spiritual despotism — into any 
folly you may imagine. It is not a certain section of the Church 
that will transform England. Men of more imbecile minds than 
these softly arrogant clergy I have nowhere encountered. I say 
nothing of the chiefs of the party. I speak of men whom I have 
met with, and talked with. They fly from all manly discussion; 
they take refuge, like children, at the petticoats of some bigger 
priest than themselves — there sulk and pout at you. 

SECKENDORF. 

You quite mistake the matter if you measure their power by 
their intellect. This is not the work for men of intellect. What 
is wanted is a body of men unanimous, and just superior to the 
minds they have to work upon. These softly arrogant clergy 
are adored by your women. My profession brings me acquainted 
with many people, and gives me some peculiar opportunities for 
observing them. I need not say that all depends on the degree 
of spiritual power ceded by the laity to the priesthood. A priest- 
hood once acknowledged to be authorized teachers, will lead the 
laity where it pleases. Well, I have never known a fashionable 
woman who was not in favour of a domineering clergy. She 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 277 

reverences the priest exactly in proportion to the claim he makes 
upon her obedience. What do you augur from this ? 

CLARENCE. 

O Seckendorf! this is childish talk. There are movements 
going on in society amongst the men who work, and the men 
who think, before which your fashionable women and their 
favoured priests will be as chaff before the wind. Nor am I 
much concerned at these monarchical tendencies that you allude 
to. Public opinion (and this is the great matter) can govern 
and advance under very diiferent forms of government. If I 
see an emperor at the head of armies, ruling as with a sense of 
duty, and with desire to obtain the suffrages of all classes, I 
imagine I have a spectacle before me of as good augury for 
progress as any that could be named. I do not desire such a 
form of government, but an empire may be administered with 
something of the spirit of a republic ; it may be little else than a 
democracy with a head to it — a democracy ruling through one 
man, one representative, instead of an assembly of representa- 
tives. And if priesthoods still govern, mark this — they come 
before the laity to prove, by dint of argument, that they ought to 
govern. They are obliged to evoke that very reason they are 
bent on supplanting. Do you see nothing in this? To bring 
back the old ' implicit faith ' would be a hopeless and absurd 
endeavour. 

SECKENDORF. 

The hopeless and absurd endeavour seems to prosper mightily 
well, and that not only in England, but in philosophical Ger- 
many. The country of Luther seems very much disposed to 
retransmit the Bible to the custody of the Church. One thing 
is very plain : You are fond, Clarence, of discoursing on the in- 
fluence of a scientijic habit of thought upon our moral and re- 
ligious opinions. I thing you cannot detect in these movements 
the influences of science or scientific discipline. 

CLARENCE. 

Not jDrecisely in this movement you are speaking of; but 
there are others in which that influence can be traced. I offer 



278 BOOK IV.— CH^\PTER V. 

no opinion upon the state of things in Germany, but in our own 
England I do not care a rush about this supposed movement 
towards Rome of a section of our Church. They have only to 
show that they really are moving in that direction, and they will 
arouse such a feeling of indignation throughout England, as will 
sweep them from the island with the force of a hurricane. 

SECKENDORF. 

England i^hall be still and eternally Protestant, if you will. 
We will leave these oscillating movements of our own day and 
generation. They seem very little to affect you, Clarence ; your 
eye is on remote centuries. Perhaps the rocking of a state to 
and fro, and this oscillation in great monarchies and churches, 
do but prove to you that Time is hurrying on his pageant some- 
what faster than usual. I will draw your attention to certain 
permanent conditions of human life, certain unalterable charac- 
teristics of this being man, which stand as obstacles or limits to 
your moral progression. 

CLARENCE. 

What are these formidable obstacles ? 

SECKENDORF. 

Take these two, Labour and Death ; and when you have 
reflected on them, I will add a third. 

These are permanent conditions, I believe, of human exist- 
ence. Nothing is given but to labour. We pay down in hard 
toil, a heavy price for the slightest acquisition made to our civili- 
zation. Every year the fields are to be cultivated, the mine is 
to be excavated, the cloth is to be woven, the house is to be 
built or rebuilt. And moreover, the age in which these toils 
ceased, would sink immediately into mental as well as bodily 
sloth. Unceasing Labour is a permanent condition of existence, 
and Death, I presume, is still the inevitable. 

Now, what very exalted Ideal of life can be realized in a race 
against which these two decrees have gone forth ? You would 
refine and intellectualize human beings, and the great multi- 
tude must labour for food, clothing and habitation, as no other 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 279 

animal labours. In the climates most propitious to intellectual 
activity there is a long winter, there are rains, and damp, and 
cold, to be incessantly provided against. The one article of fuel 
sends thousands into the bowels of the earth ; they have to dig 
deeper every year. Whether it is worth while to speculate on 
the very remote contingency of the coal-fields of Europe being 
exhausted, I cannot say ; I leave that to men who take future 
centuries under their especial care. What is plain to us is, that 
coal and iron are prime necessaries of life, and the getting them 
is no child's play. The steam-engine is the great boast, and 
fairly so, of modern times ; but follow the steam-engine through- 
out its whole history, its making, and all the work it performs, 
and for every stroke of the piston there has been the stroke of a 
human arm, or perhaps the throbbing of some human brain. 
For when the man has got the machine to work for him, he 
always finds that he has converted himself also into a machine, 
and stands by, working mechanically with it for hour after hour. 
No engine has yet been invented which, if it profited one part of 
mankind, has not also been an engine of torture to another. 

You will say that, without this incessant labour, the knowl- 
edge and intelligence of man could never have been developed. 
Tlie want that stimulates labour has also stimulated thought. 
That such is the nature of men, is the very fact I have to point 
out to you. 

To my mind, one of the saddest spectacles the earth reveals is 
precisely this : The traveller depicts to me some fertile island in 
a delicious climate, where the bread-fruit hangs from the tree, 
where the soft winds are themselves warmth and clothino- — 

o 

depicts to me an earthly paradise; and the next moment he 
shows me the human tenant of it, a very child, a simple savage, 
very little wiser than the fowls of the air, or the fishes of the sea. 
No progress was made, because the earth was spontaneously 
fruitful, and the skies were kind. 

You tell me that man invents marvellous machines that work 
for him. He cannot ; his machines are only complicated tools, 
with which he also must continually work. But if he could 
make the iron and the wood really work for him, then behold 
the bread-fruit tree is again growing over his head — the winds 



280 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

again are clothing him — he is again an idler, and crawling like 
an infant on the ground. 

We labour and we die. Well, but the moralist will teach us 
how to live the little life we have. If by morality be meant a 
control of the passions, the teacher has either a very hopeless, or 
very needless task. Whilst the passion is young and strong, the 
moralist is not heard ; when it is feeble or extinct, the man can 
moralize for himself — only much too late. Just when we have 
learnt to live, we find that we are dying out ; just when we begin 
to value this mysterious gift of life, it is taken from us. We 
leave our place to some puling infant : " the sage is withering 
like a leaf." We are mere stubble, and the plough passes over 
us, that a new verdure may spring up. Not a day even of the 
brief space allotted to us is secure. We tread perchance upon a 
rolling stone — we breathe an air too keen — and there is an end 
to all. Fool or philosopher, it is all alike. 

A perfect morality in a world where there is death! Dis- 
cipline thyself! — for what? Choose the quiet and prolonged 
pleasures of temperance and self-denial ! Quiet very, but how 
prolonged ? Sacrifice the present enjoyment for a greater one 
in the future ! What future ? When, cold and half-dead with 
age, I shall have no capacity for enjoyment left me ? Or when 
a certain " politic convention of worms " will be at the feast, and 
I shall have the honour of providing the banquet? 

Here also it is most true that Death, like Labour, is the con- 
dition of our intellectual being. Without the necessity of labour 
there would have been no art, no science ; without the certainty 
of death, no rehgion, no philosophy. It was the necessity to 
live by labour that stimulated the faculties of man to observe 
and to invent; it was the inevitable certainty of Death that 
roused him to the higher mental activities of speculation and 
philosophy. It was this startled him into thought. There is a 
perfect harmony in the human being — you may be sure of that. 
There is this kind of perfection at least — that you could not remove 
a stone without the whole superstructure falling on your head. 

I am not surprised that the earliest of sages — Greek, Hebrew, 
or Chaldean — were perplexed at these two decrees of fate. La- 
bour and Death. They thought the gods must have been envi- 



SECKENDOKF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 281 

ous of mankind, or that man must have committed some crime 
ao-ainst his Maker, and brought down upon his head those two 
dreadful punishments. Such they seemed to the earhest sages ; 
and to the latest posterity Labour will not seem less a curse, 
because our whole being is moulded on the sordid necessity ; nor 
Death less a curse, because we decay down to it till it becomes 
welcome, or because, it alarmed us into meditation upon our- 
selves, or because, in the fulness of our life and our agony, this 
black line drawn across our path stilled our discontent, and 
hushed all terrors by a greater. 

CLARENCE. 

I admit all you say of Labour — I admit all you say of Death 
— I have only something more to say. Your remark is most 
true that Death startles us into reflection upon life ; but the 
thought which is stimulated by that dark Hue upon the horizon 
finally transcends that line. But even if you insist upon it, that 
life ends with our physical being, the brevity of life does not 
affect our advancement in morality in the manner you seem to 
think. The love of esteem is the ruling moral motive with 999 
men out of every thousand. Now, we never ask how long we 
shall live before we are actuated by this feeling or desire, any 
more than we ask how long we shall live before we experience 
any other strong emotion. A man feels this desire for the ap- 
probation of others in the very hour of death; perhaps never 
feels it more strongly. 

SECKENDORF. 

True : and you are perfectly right in fixing your eyes steadily 
upon public opinion and the love of esteem as the regulating 
powers of the world. But there are unfortunately many public 
opinions, and my love of esteem may be gratified though I am 
going headlong to destruction. I am surrounded by those who 
think fit to go to destruction in the same way, and so we cheer 
each other on the downward road. 

CLARENCE. 

Men who cheer each other on such downward roads are con- 



282 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

scious that they are banding themselves together against a wider 
opinion — against what is the real moral opinion of the society. 

Speaking generally, we can he iviser for others than for our^ 
selves. We are wiser therefore when we judge than when we 
act, and consequently, though the same men form the opinion 
who are to be ruled by it, the ruling opinion is wiser and more 
constant than the passionate individual whom it rules. 

SECKENDORF. 

But you cannot keep passion altogether out of the formation 
of the opinion itself. And the different passions, and circum- 
stances, and culture of men will beget diversities of moral opin- 
ions — diversities which weaken your moral government, or con- 
vert it into what you would call an immoral government. 
There is one cause of diversity, there is one line of separation 
•which will run its eternal zigzag through the most uniform com- 
munity you can imagine. It is conceivable that you might 
abolish the distinction between rich and poor ; but the distinction 
between young and old you certainly will not efface. And 
unanimity of opinion between young and old, between those who 
are in the summer of their lives and those who are in mid-winter, 
will assuredly not be found. 

And this leads me to that third permanent condition or char- 
acteristic of human life, which I promised to suggest for Clar- 
ence's meditation. 

I know not precisely how his Utopians intend to deal with 
war. It seems that the whole earth must be Utopian before 
any one nation can secure peace for itself, except by its ability 
for defensive war. However, as the whole earth may become 
wise in time, there is here a certain possibility in view. But 
how those wise nations of the earth will deal with the soft 
seductions of peace — with that which is pre-eminently pleasure 
— passes all my power of divination. This love of woman does 
not die out at all — I suppose that neither of you would have the 
heart to wish that it should ; it seems the perennial source of all 
that is amiable and good amongst us. This spring, however, 
this ebullient source of very life itself, has a terrible, uncontroll- 
able force in it. Nature seems to have overdone her work. 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 283 

The power of woman over the imagination of youth grows with 
every advance of civilization. Decorated with all the refine- 
ments of art, veiled by the delicacies of manner and deportment 
— the cool leafage under which the fruit lies tenfold more tempt- 
ing to the eye — woman becomes the veritable siren or goddess 
of the young. 

Now consider that this passion, which grows with our civiliza- 
tion, is one which all have, and which a very large proportion 
cannot gratify in the legitimate bond of marriage. — But I need 
not suggest a topic that must have perplexed every one who has 
attempted to frame or imagine a model community. Make for 
men any law you please, and suppose that it is faithfully obeyed, 
(which is a most extravagant supposition,) you have still only a 
choice of evils : for repressed passion is itself an evil of no little 
magnitude, reacting upon the whole temperament of the man in 
a manner not generally understood. 

Take with you, then, these permanent elements or conditions 
of human life — Incessant labour for food — the brevity and un- 
certainty of life — the passion nature implants for the preserva- 
tion of the race — say briefly Food, Death, Sex — meditate on 
these three little monosyllables, and then set to work to form 
exalted and ideal societies. 

CLARENCE. 

You have not a very encouraging way of throwing the mate- 
rials before us. I feel, however, that I could answer you, only I 
should require a little time to marshal my ideas. 

SECKENDORF. 

Our Catholic priest would tame this passion of love, or scare 
it away — as we scare some beautiful wild beast — by brandishing 
fire and flame before its eyes. You do not approve of this 
method. As every thing is to progress, you have some religious 
progress incompatible with this expedient. You are disposed to 
snatch from the priest his burning brand. That it was altogether 
efficacious no one will pretend, neither was it without some result. 
Meanwhile, this beautiful wild beast, this spotted leopard, is still 
amongst us, and will enter, somewhat more rampant than ever, 



284 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

into your model community. I foresee that it will occasion 
much embarrassment there. 

THOKNDALE. 

What is your matured opinion as to the real efficacy of this 
same fiery brand you speak of ? 

SECKENDORF. 

It is difficult to estimate the force of a remote threat against 
a present temptation. When the temptation is close upon us, all 
prudential considerations, of this world or the next, are forgotten. 
But religion keeps men out of the way of temptation. It draws 
a cordon sanitaire which often debars us from ground innocuous 
itself, but which is too near the seat of danger. For some 
minds it effects this purpose by giving them a constant subject 
for thought, for inquiry, for reflection. Keep men thinking, and 
it matters little what their doctrines or their philosophy may be, 
we pretty well know what their lives must be. A Spinoza gives 
as little trouble to the State as the Seraphic Doctor himself. 
All men absorbed in thinking have that which will keep them 
steady as they pace the strange passage from birth to death. 

CLARENCE. 

How it is, Seckendorf, you harp so often upon the priests and 
their services — a body of men you do not always love, and never 
once agree with ? 

SECKENDORF. 

Because, if you look within the great church of Christendom, 
you will discover that our sins themselves turn to such regrets 
and penitences, as make it a question whether the world would 
be a gainer by even getting rid of sin. 

And here, again, Clarence, how utterly destructive would be 
that religious reformation I often hear you hint at ! 

You would mitigate the terrors of a future world. How often 
must I tell you that the great hope you are so solicitous to pre- 
serve, is bound up in one common life with the great fear you 
seem equally desirous of extinguishing. When there are no 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 285 

longer any wicked men to punish, there will be no longer any 
good men to reward. If there is no final irrevocable sentence 
for the one, there is no final permanent beatitude for the other. 
If you open a new trial-scene for the wicked, you open it also 
for the good. Your Above is a correlate of your Below. The 
pillars of heaven are sunk in hell : so much of church architec- 
ture is palpable. It is certainly the architecture of the Chris- 
tian church. In the happiest of Christians, fear is the unseen 
root of all their hope and all their love. Fear, transmitted into 
Reverence, finally trembles into Love. The terror-stricken 
spirit gazing doivn, receives its first upward impulse. It flies 
shrieking with despair, but flies shrieking upwards, and calms its 
sobs in heaven. 

The religion of Utopia is to have no Tartarus. Utopians will 
need none, will supply no souls to people such a place, no class 
of men who are emigrating that way. Well, then, your people 
of Utopia must also dispense with their eternal Elysium. If 
Fear depart out of religion, it is not long after that Hope will 
remain. If you will not tolerate the infinite Terror that dark- 
ens the abyss below, you must lose sight of the infinite Joy that 
brightens above us. In short, your religious progress would be 
the annihilation of religion. I see a more distinct hmit here than 
on any other path along which you would carry us. Your sci- 
entific discipline of mind, your universal benevolence, are to be 
imported into religion. Well, this world may thus grow brighter, 
happier, more beautiful, but that other — has "faded into the 
light of common day." 

CLARENCE. 

I think that the pillars of heaven will stand still more securely 
upon our solid earth. I hold that the contrast between Life and 
Eternity, the Passing and the Permanent, will be sufiicient for 
the sustenance of religious Hope. 

Moreover, it is not I who preach a change ; the change is 
taking place. 

Let me say (by way of parenthesis) that, standing on my own 
English soil, I am in politics a Conservative. Our public insti- 
tutions, civil and religious, admit the free culture of the human 
mmd — admit that unobserved social progress on which all other 



286 BOOK IV.— CHAPTEK V. 

progress must finally depend. I have no quarrel with the 
Church of England, but there is one doctrine of our Protestant 
creed which the intelligent laity are quietly deserting. Men 
who do not openly oppose it, tacitly deny it. I mean that of the 
eternal nature of future punishments. The whole subject of 
future punishments is treated in a different spirit by divines 
themselves than it was a century ago. What educated man 
would now write or preach upon this topic as Jeremy Tay- 
lor did ? None but the coarsest of the populace would listen 
to an orator dwelling eloquently on the torments of the con- 
demned. I met the other day with a passage in Bossuet, 
on the subject of Infant Baptism, in which he censures the 
weakness of those men who shrink from asserting that the un- 
baptized infant is lost — condemned. We have lately had the 
controversy about infant baptism revived amongst us. What 
English divine was there who did not display this censurable 
weakness ? 

In fact, our theologians are really too amiable to believe, as 
literal truth, what, in some metaphorical sense, they can still 
conscientiously place amongst their articles of creed. The most 
zealous champion of orthodoxy is merely involved in the heat 
and passion of controversy. He is very angry, but he means 
nothing. Let me prove w^ith text upon text that this or that 
doctrine is a damnable heresy — but, for God's sake, let nothing 
come of it ! 

Look at the literature of our country. This surely is the 
place to seek for the best and latest currents of opinion. If I 
had books about me, I could read to you page after page of our 
most esteemed writers, which manifest as clear as day a complete 
alienation from the old faith of an eternal Tartarus ; and — mind 
you this ! — which at the same time breathe a genuine spirit of 
piety, and love to God, and an unfeigned conviction that God is 
love. Never was there a time when the Devil, and the region 
he is supposed to preside over, were so little dwelt on, or so 
tacitly ignored ; and never was there a time when there was so 
vivid a conviction, so confirmed a faith, in the existence of a 
Benevolent Creator, or more genuine piety and gratitude felt 
towards that ineffable Being from whom emanate all power, all 
reason, all love. 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 287 

You tell me that this religion does not suit our climate. My 
answer is, that the climate is gradually changing, and that the 
appearance of this modification of our religion is one proof of the 
change. I call this truly " a Sign of the Times," and one full 
of significance. A religion is growing up amongst us that can 
only reach its maturity in a society much better organized than 
the one we at present behold. And a better organization is also 
slowly forming — a society to correspond with the religion. I 
like this sign of the times. Political revolutions, however tre- 
mendous they may appear, may be sudden and transitory events, 
more like gusts of passion than effects of the slow and multifa- 
rious progress of a human society. Storms and portents in the 
sky may pass, and leave the morrow like the yesterday. But 
w^hat if I see, were it but a single blade of a quite new vegeta- 
tion, that could not live in the old climate — that can live only 
under temperate and gentle skies — what if I see this new ver- 
dure forcing its timid way through the hard soil? You will 
admit that there is more proof and more prediction of change in 
this instance of new life springing up here and there in sheltered 
spots between the furrows, than there would be in a ^vhole hemi- 
sphere of storms and tempests. 

SECKENDORF. 

That benevolent laxity of faith which you speak of may be 
found amongst certain of your contemporaries, but I repeat that 
it can be found only amongst those who hold with equal laxity 
their faith in an eternal beatitude. Your little blade of grass, I 
think, must go back again into the furrow. One thing is quite 
indisputable. Study carefully all the advanced nations of Eu- 
rope, — England, France, Prussia, Austria ; in every one you 
will find a growing and predominant desire to strengthen the 
power of the Church. The Church is to be the institution to 
govern and to educate the people. What is the simple interpre- 
tation of this ? That the fear of future punishments is felt to be 
the only guarantee for the peace of society. Whether it is an 
Austrian minister or an English Justice of the Peace, you hear 
repeatedly the same sentiment, that the education of the people 
must be religious. In other words, the laws which protect life 



288 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

and property will not be obeyed, unless you can attach to them 
the penalties of an after world. 

CLARENCE. 

Every social epoch brings forward that modification of relig- 
ious faith which is suitable to it, and the society and the religion 
both change slowly, and with many oscillating movements. 
"What I insist upon is this, that it is a true and genuine faith 
that really governs. As long as a faith lasts amongst a people, 
it will govern them ; but if it should be changing, it is not an 
Austrian minister or an English justice of the peace, full of the 
expediency of his faith, who will be able to withstand the change. 
State-craft and a virtuous hypocrisy may do much when they 
side with a faith rooted in the minds of the people ; but they 
cannot plant it there, or revive it there. 

I want nothing more than what we have in England ; institu- 
tions which suit the people, and free scope to think and speak, 
so that individual minds may grow freely, taking advantage of 
the fresh knowledge which comes in from every quarter. 

I can sympathize with almost every genuine conviction ; but 
there is one phase of thought, or of the thinking man, with which 
I have no sympathy whatever — which I beg leave simply to 
denounce, and to separate myself from entirely. I hear some 
men say " It is not true," and the next moment utter an " Esto 
perpetua ! " Such esto perpetua I would not for worlds pro- 
nounce. What faith in God can that man have who does not 
believe that Truth and Expediency must finally be one ? 

I hate this hypocrisy ! Only think what strange presumption 
and contempt of other men it implies. This is Truth ! — this is 
for me and for my friends. That is Falsehood ! — that is for you 
and for the multitude. If this is what you call the aristocracy 
of intellect, may I for ever remain a plebeian. 

I hate this hypocrisy ! It obscures from ourselves the mea- 
sure of ti'uth we really possess. Men put forth profession instead 
of belief, till they do not themselves distinguish between the two. 
They shuffle and confuse their own best faiths amongst articles 
of creed to which they give a mere verbal assent. Many a man 
who is thought by others to be a greater believer than he really 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 289 

is — thinks himself a greater disbeliever than he really is. He 
almost loses sight of some of the highest truths of his reason, 
because he has habitually mixed them up with detected, or sus- 
pected superstitions. Besides, it is by open and candid speech, 
man to man, that each one of us comes fully to understand what 
he does believe in. Shut up my mouth, and you will soon after 
shut up my thought too. If I must practise a dishonest speech, 
I lose the habit of thinking honestly. 

I too can admire what I do not personally participate. But 
it is the sincere faith of the man who thinks differently from 
myself that I can admire. I cannot admire his studied hypoc- 
risy if he is a reflective man, nor can 1 much admire the mere 
mechanical assent of a multitude, nodding their heads all one 
way, and at the same moment. 

SECKENDORF. 

Take this with you — Numbers do not make a truth, but num- 
bers make a faith. Therefore hypocritical or mechanical assent 
— assent of all kinds — has its use. 

CLARENCE. 

Yes, to statesmen and churchmen who think that the world 
requires to be governed by a faith which is not also a truth. 
Let every one in his own age and generation be sincere. For 
what measure of truth he has, he cannot be responsible ; but all 
of us should be truth-loving. Thank Heaven ! I do not believe 
in the eternal necessity of error for the government of the world. 

SECKENDORF. 

You do not govern the world at all ; you are speculating how 
the world will govern itself some thousand years hence. If you 
were called upon to take a part in any existing polity in Chris- 
tendom, you would be so rejoiced to find some approach to uni- 
formity in the religious creed of the people, that you would not 
be very captious in criticizing the means by which such a 
uniformity was brought about. 

13 



290 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

CLARENCE. 

You, Seckendorf, with all your diabolical philosophy, no man 
can accuse of any taint of hypocrisy. With no credo of your 
own, with many motives for acquiescing in the credo of others, 
you stand aloof from us all. You are too proud, and too defi- 
ant, to put on the semblance of any other man's faith. But you 
have what I shall call a malicious toleration for the hypocrisy of 
others. You have a cynical sympathy with the proud priest 
who rules over the minds of others by a fear to which he does 
not succumb himself. You like Despotism in the state ; and 
you like the alliance between it and a Sacerdotal Despotism. 
Sitting aloft and apart with a few intellectual aristocrats like 
yourself, you see the game of life played thus ! — and you 
applaud. 

SECKENDORF. 

Do justice, my dear young friend, to the Political Priest — to 
the Sacerdotal Despot, as you have called him. He says, " I 
have a world to govern — no light work ; an obstinate, passion- 
ate, much afflicted world ; and I do govern it, for I hold in my 
hand the keys of Heaven and of Hell. And now you tell me 
of some little knot of pensive people who have discovered what 
they call a truth. They question and deny my truth by which 
I govern. Let them stand, then, apart, and mutter to them- 
selves what they please, but the multitude must not hear. If 
they come into the market-place and disturb my government, I 
sweep them from the face of the earth. I hang a bow of prom- 
ise in the clouds ; and whilst men look up to it, they toil and 
they sweat ; they commit few murders, and steal but now and 
then. They half forget their present agony, and postpone their 
anger and their revenge. These wise men say it is not a bow of 
promise; it is a coloured mist. Be wiser still, and keep the 
secret. How else can I hold these men to their inevitable toil ? 
Or perhaps some knot of bland and amiable heretics come with 
promises more glorious than mine. What must I answer ? If 
I spoke frankly, I should say, ' Deluded and amiable heretics, 
your nonsense is as good as ours ; had it come first, it should 
have sat in the judgment-seat ; as it comes second, it must go to 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATURE OF PROGRESS. 291 

the scaffold : there is not room for both. One follj is govern- 
ment, two is confusion.' " 

CLARENCE. 

I deny, with all my heart and soul, that the cause of good 
government requires any one man to be false. The faiths you 
speak of do govern, but they govern as sincere beliefs ; and 
when they cease to be sincere beliefs, they cease to be necessary 
as means of government. 

How can a mind like yours that sees so clearly the eternal 
harmony of all things, be so indifferent to the cause of Truth? 

SECKENDORF. 

It will be time enough to be zealous for truth when we have 
a truth to be zealous for. 

Truth, like Eternity, may belong only to the One — may as 
little belong to man as creative power belongs to man. 

Meanwhile, why may I not be permitted to admire what has 
been produced — this psychical creation laid open before me, 
whether you call it error or truth ? The monarchies of Europe, 
and the great Church of Christendom, which is the spiritual 
monarchy under which they are all gathered together, present 
to my mind the grandest spectacle that Time has yet revealed. 
Keither Greece, nor Judea, nor Rome ever exhibited a national 
life so full, so emotional, so sublime. It is, in fact, Greece and 
Judea and Rome mingled together. So grows the great hete- 
rogeneous life of human society. You would cut it down to the 
poor dimensions of some one philosopher's truth. — How silent 
you have been, Thorndale ! 

THORNDALE. 

I have listened with pleasure. You perhaps will not take 
it as a compliment, but I have been asking myself whether the 
representation you have been giving is not rather of the nature 
of poetry than philosophy ; you dwell so much on the emotional 
side of these questions. You subordinate truth to life, not life 
to truth. 



292 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER V. 

SECKENDORF. 

We have all been poets once ; for we have all been young. 
If my partiality to the great Church of Christendom seems 
strange or excessive, you may attribute it, if you please, to the 
bias of early education. I have told you I am of a Catholic 
family. It was part of the family pride to adhere to the ances- 
tral church. I was brought up a devout believer in all its mys- 
teries, and having both some ardour in my character and some 
reflective tendency, my early tuition was not without result. I 
have known those emotions that I sometimes descant upon. 

In Catholic churches, as you are well aware, a lamp hangs 
burning night and day before the high altar, where the host is 
enshrined. I used to take my book — which was perhaps the 
life of some saint — at midnight into the church, and read it by 
the light of that lamp. There were lights enough in the paternal 
mansion, and that lamp burned very dimly, and I had to bribe 
the sacristan withal for permission to enter ; but the thing pleased 
my boyish fancy. Under that sacred lamp I chose to sit, often 
to kneel. It hung suspended by a long massive chain, which 
the eye in vain strove to trace to its termination in the roof. 
This chain divided, so to speak, into tiiree smaller ones, between 
which the lamp itself hung and burnt. I see before me now the 
slow moving shadows which those three chains cast on the walls 
and pillars of the vast church, lit only by this solitary lamp. 
The slightest breath of wind was sufficient to give some move- 
ment to this long pendulum ; the distance magnified the shadows 
till it was difficult to connect their appearance with the simjDle 
object that threw them along those aisles, and my imagination 
sought and craved whatever could lend aid to a sentiment of 
fear and mystery. I have travelled since in all parts of the 
world, have seen much, have been mingled up in many exciting 
events, but there is nothing so indelibly impressed upon my 
memory as the midnight interior of that church, its one lamp, its 
long aisles, and the dim shadows of those chains moving over 
its pillars ; I, all the while, in fearful communion with saints and 
angels. 

We live many lives in one ; but the first life is never quite 
superseded. I saw you, Thorndale, in one of our rambles, cast 



SECKENDORF ON THE NATUEE OF PROGRESS. 293 

a long and lingering look at a little monastery seen in the dis- 
tance, half hidden amongst the trees. Thorn dale, if you and I 
could cease thinking for one wliole day, we might, as the sun 
declined, walk arm-in-arm together into such a monastery. 

THORNDALE. 

What should we do if we began to think again when the doors 
had once closed upon us ? Guarantee me from such a relapse, 
and I, for one, have no philosophy that I could not willingly 
exchange for the devotional life of a believing monk. 

CLARENCE. 

And I ! — Oh that I had " words that burn," that I might ex- 
press my indignant protest, Thorndale, against the sentiment you 
have uttered ! The sincere piety, the deep and wounded feel- 
ings, which have led men to such retreats, shall have from me 
due honour and respect. But to see God as the monk sees him ! 
— nature shut out — and the beauty and the love of woman no 
longer recognized as Heaven's choicest gift — from my point of 
view, it were a black ingratitude. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LAST DAT WITH SECKENDORF DESULTORY CONVERSATION 

ON THE ANIMAL CREATION AND ON MAN. 

Occasionally Seckendorf would treat Clarence and myself 
to some exposition on his own especial sciences, physiology and 
comparative anatomy, and sometimes we all three plunged to- 
gether into the abyss of metaphysical discussion. But these 
conversations I would not, at this distance of time, attempt to 
revive. And indeed Seckendorf avoided in general, what he 
called professorial talk ; he liked to meet us on a level common 
to all ; he liked to follow up, sometimes with a sportive freedom, 
the suggestions of the moment. 

The day before I took my departure from these two philo- 
sophic friends, the weather happened to be so very fine, and so 
very warm withal, that we spent nearly the whole morning, 
loitering or lying down together on the borders of the lake, and 
under the shadow of the trees. I think if a Boswell had been 
amongst us to take down the conversation of Seckendorf, he 
would have collected the materials for a very amusing chap- 
ter. The talk was quite desultory, roaming, without any method, 
over such vast subjects as animal life, and human life. I shall 
try to recall some portion of it ; I find this a pleasant occupation ; 
for whilst I am engaged in it, many other trains of thought are 
suggested besides those which are giving employment to my 
pen. 

As we were reclining by the calm surface of the lake, suddenly 
a little splash was seen upon the water ; a fish had risen at a fly. 
" There was life, then," said I, " under that calm motionless sur- 
face." 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 295 

" And death too, it seems," said Seckeiidorf ; " death for the 
flj. The glitter of the water had attracted the insect, and the 
glitter of the insect the fish." 

THORNDALE. 

I could never understand the mirth, the "laughter," which 
Spinoza is said to have indulged in, when witnessing the contest 
between the spider and the fly. I can comprehend that so 
abstract a philosopher would have risen above our natural 
repugnance, and surveyed very calmly an instance of a general 
and a wise law of nature — (life surrendered to support other and 
generally higher life) — but why should the death of the poor fly 
have occasioned laughter ? 

SECKENDORF. 

A philosopher living amongst his abstractions may have been 
glad of any excuse for a laugh. 

CLARENCE. 

I confess I am not philosophic enough to get over my natural 
repugnance to the spider's method of providing for himself. 
Some little time ago, on just such a day as this, I stood for 
shelter from the heat, under the thick branches of an oak-tree. 
In that thoughtful mood, when the eye continues looking, though 
we half forget that we are looking, I stood prying into the deep 
scars and seams of the old wrinkled bark of the venerable tree. 
A little golden fly comes into view — steals into my field of 
vision, and is seen walking amidst the ridges of the bark. It 
is one of those delicate creatures, green and gold — name to me 
unknown — whose long taper transparent wings, when folded, 
stretch out behind and far beyond the body. Its slender legs 
seem to struggle desperately with the rugged bark, which forms 
a terrible defile to such a pedestrian ; and the lightest breeze 
threatens to blow it out of all steerage, for there is no weight 
of body to act as ballast against those long golden wings : the 
whole creature is given up to beauty. As I watch, with a sort 
of fond curiosity, this veritable fairy of the woods, so delicately 
picking its way — lo I her foot has touched the web of a wily 



296 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

spider. Quick as thought the enemy is upon her. In a moment 
the one drop of blood which nourished so much beauty in so 
little space, is gone to sustain the life of this ungainly foe. A 
sheath sucked dry, with the wings still appended to it, is left 
fluttering in the assassin's web. 

SECKENDORF. 

Assassin and traitor both! A clear case of murder. But, 
according to the law as Tliorndale has stated it, this ugly assas- 
sin, with all this murderous power, ranks higher than the in- 
nocuous beauty. I have travelled where I have seen the same 
tragedy enacted by the giants of the earth ; I have seen the 
crocodile make the river itself serve him as a decoy or bait by 
which to entrap all thirsty souls. Along the White Nile this 
enormous beast lies in wait for whatever animal thirst brings 
down to the banks of the stream. The antelope, for all its 
timidity and fleetness, does not escape. It falls into the jaws of 
this huge dragon who keeps the river, and levies this horrible 
tribute. In some parts the overhanging woods are populous 
with monkeys, a chattering, noisy, most vivacious tribe. They 
may well chatter ; they are devoured by thirst, and the tempting 
river flows below, but in the river lies the crocodile. I have 
seen them descend the tree stealthily to drink, but they took 
only one draught at a time ; they were up the tree again in an 
instant, for their not sleeping adversary was there to make a 
mouthful of them if they tarried for a second. I cannot see, I 
must confess, that the crocodile has any other superiority than 
that of strength over the creatures he devours. I have stood 
with the great naturalist Audubon on the banks of the Missis- 
sippi, and witnessed with him that terrible encounter he has 
somewhere described between the eagle and the swan. The 
eagle and the swan — are they not the two chief beasts of nature, 
and the eternal themes of the poet ? Both most beautiful ; the 
one our type of serenity and peace, the other of power and mag- 
nanimity. I see them now before me — the swan upon the flow- 
ing river, the eagle upon the towering tree. What is it that 
makes me start with a momentary thrill of horror? In an 
instant, with a motion quick as lightning, the eagle has dashed 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 297 

down before the swan — has struck its talons in its downy breast 
— has thrown it on its side — has dragged it to the shore — has 
buried its beak in its blood. What a commotion of wings there 
was as the conquering and the conquered bird came floating 
together, beating the water in death struggle, to the shore ! 

THORNDALE. 

Alas ! might seems here the only right. The same deed per- 
formed by those larger creatures seems so much more terrible. 
I don't know whether this ought to be so. 

SECKENDORF. 

The giraffe is the SAvan of animals ; it lives and dies without 
uttering a sound. Lofty and gentle, it may be seen, in some fair 
Asiatic plain, browsing on the leaves of trees. Its eye is more 
beautiful than the gazelle's. Every movement of that graceful 
neck betokens peace. On that graceful neck the tiger springs ! 
The magnificent giraffe, like your little golden insect in the fur- 
rows of the oak-tree, lies bleeding and dead upon the ground. 

Food ! food ! food ! This is the incessant cry throughout the 
whole animal creation. That sublime eagle on the Andes, 
•whose eye, the poet says, " looks over half the world," is looking 
only for its food. Food ! food ! You hear it in the roar of him 
we call monarch of the woods. Food ! Every living thing 
must get it, or give it to another. Essential, the quite indis- 
pensable, and yet no settled rations ; undisturbed pastures for so 
few ; and the population question everywhere determined in this 
wild peremptory manner. 

CLARENCE. 

All the larger beasts of prey -will apparently be exterminated 
as the race of man advances to take possession of the earth. 
Every animal that threatens him or his flocks, that attacks the 
shepherd or his sheep, must take its departure. No lion, no 
tiger, where man inhabits. 

SECKENDORF. 

Unless they are preserved in som^ phalanstery foi\wild beasts^ 
13* 



298 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

which would be a good name for our menageries and zoological 
gardens. But men will not do much to reform the ways of the 
animal creation : they cannot prevent murder on the high seas 
amongst the fishes; and the whole insect tribe are singularly 
intractable. 

THORNDALE. 

These swarms of locusts, for instance. One cannot be ex- 
pected to sympathize very keenly with the sufferings of these 
destructive creatures, who do not even ]pespect the husbandry 
and tillage of man. But if one thinks of it, this army of spoilers 
and invaders must be an army of martyrs too. What a fam- 
ished host ! what a march is theirs ! No baggage, no supplies, 
no commissariat, and the country laid waste by the advanced 
guard long before the main body can come up. Happily, at 
length, a cloud of birds is seen hovering behind them on the 
wing. Dilatory birds ! why had they not been quicker to de- 
vour, and saved both us and the locusts from this terrible emi- 
gration ? 

This general fact, that the animal, when it does not prey upon 
the animal, preys upon the vegetable, is curious. The principle 
of life sacrificed to maintain other life, follows us throughout. 
The beautiful leaf must die, were it the fairest rose-leaf in the 
garden, to feed any slug that can get at it. I have watched the 
young oak-trees putting forth their foliage in the spring ; and 
before the leaves were fully formed, one half of them were 
defaced and partly devoured by insects. 

And is it not singular to notice that the principle of defence 
is already typified in the thorn ? Not a very effective w^eapon 
of defence to the plant itself, but rather a type of that plan which 
nature acts on throughout, since every creature that is attacked 
has some instrument or some method of defence and preservation. 

SECKENDORF. 

As we gaze upon the scene of animated nature, what an 
amazing prodigality of life it seems to disclose ! Life to support 
life. First the herb, the tree, the flower, are sacrificed ; then 
animal feeds upon animal. It is well. Thus none die of slow 
decay. There is no decrepitude or senility anywhere but with 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 299 

man, or the beasts he takes under his protection. Everywhere 
else there is perpetual youth. Life stops altogether where the 
mature powers begin to decline, that vigour may take the place 
of weakness. It is well. But still it strikes with a certain awe, 
when one contemplates this ceaseless, wide, interminable stream 
of mingled life and death. Most animals, in their natural state, 
live in fear of some mortal enemy, an enemy who cannot spare. 
It is a feud which admits of no reconciliation ; immitigable hun- 
ger and the law of self-preservation urge it on. Everywhere 
there is a perpetual hunt, a perpetual flight. Each creature has 
given to it some means of defence and protection ; each creature 
also guards its young with even more pertinacity than it protects its 
own life. Thus every race holds its ground ; and the naturalist, 
after calling on us to admire the instincts and weapons for seiz- 
ing and destroying the prey, points out to us, the next moment, 
the instincts and weapons equally curious, by which that prey 
contrives for a time to elude destruction. In the depths of the 
sea, over all lands, in the sun, in the shadow, this eternal chase 
and flight, this eternal war, are going on ; in the darkest pit 
there is some life crawling, and some foe crawling behind it. I 
have watched the worm slow moving over the damp earth, half 
his body already in the body of the toad slowly moving after it. 
There is no pause, no peace. Confess that it is not exactly the 
scene to look upon with dainty human sympathies. Provision 
is made for the utmost abundance of young and vigorous life. 
Just in proportion as a species is exposed to destruction, is it 
gifted with prolific power ; each race keeps its ground by dint 
of this marvellous vital force. The scheme is grand and good, 
no doubt of that ; at least it is certainly out of our power to con- 
ceive of a better, or even of any other scheme. But you must 
rise to some elevation to survey the whole scene with perfect 
equanimity. 

CLARENCE. 

In one respect man is evidently the lord of the creation : he 
has no enemy who can put a limit upon the multiplication of his 

species. 

SECKENDORF. 

Better for him, perhaps, if he had. He has to perform that 



300 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

office for himself. Tribe fights with tribe, and nation with 
nation ; famine has to do the rest. Occasionally the plague or 
pestilence breaks out and thins the hive, taking for the most part 
the half-starved and emaciated amongst them. 

CLARENCE. 

But reason and prudence arise to perform the office — the 
" moral check," as our political economists have it. 

SECKENDORF. 

Yes, the "moral" and the "immoral check," and prudent 
abstinence from marriage in that class where the difficulty of 
obtaining food is not the chief anxiety. Where it is, the pru- 
dence does not happen to be developed. 

But now let me make an observation in which Clarence will 
agree with me. There may be very little diffiirence, so far as 
the pleasure of each is concerned, between the animal that flies 
and the animal that gives chase — between the pursuer and the 
victim ; and in both the amount of pleasure may, on the whole, 
preponderate over that of pain. For the fear which induces an 
animal to fly, is not that fear of death which blanches the cheek 
of the much-anticipating man. It may be an impulse not so 
painful as the hunger which impels his assailant to pursue. 

What a keen and intense pleasure is derived from the vigor- 
ous exercise of a healthy muscle ! Even in the complex and 
opulent life of a human being, what a prominent place it takes ! 
To rise refreshed from sleep, or to start from the desk or the 
study, and then walk rapidly through the bracing air, is a pleas- 
ure no man despises ; no man who has ever had a day's sickness 
despises it. Now, amongst the animal creation, this delight of 
movement — bounding, or creeping, or flying — is most intimately 
connected with the interminable quest after food, and is espe- 
cially called forth by this chase and flight, this attack and de- 
fence. That the animal who seeks its prey, who runs scenting 
hither and thither, or swims, or flies, hovering like the sea-gull 
over the waters, feels a keen excitement and i^leasurable move- 
ment, will not be doubted. Nor is the excitement of danger 
without the same attendant pleasure. Whether it sees the foe, 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 301 

or suspects its presence, the animal is kept upon the alert, and 
prompted to the exercise of its limbs. The stag that flies, toss- 
ing its antlers in the air, and confident of its speed, owed to its 
fear of an adversary the full development and proud conscious- 
ness of its own wonderful powers. I have seen it start as if it 
provoked the chase, and rejoiced in the impulse and the occasion 
that would give that thrilling supple form, in full flight, to the 
winds. Pain everywhere is the forerunner of pleasure. Hun- 
ger compels one animal, and fear another ; but the full exercise 
of all its vital powers follows to each. And what shall we say 
of the combat ? for not always is it flight. It seems to me that, 
in the mortal combat, every nerve, every limb, every energy, is 
in its utmost tension and activity, and the animal reaches its 
climax of existence. 

A climax of existence attained, let me add, most signally in 
man. A vision of some Tartar or Scythian warrior comes to 
me out of the desert. I see him mounted on his horse, half as 
intelligent and far more tractable than- himself. I see him, the 
scymitar held before his eyes, rushing to battle. Very horrible ! 
But it fascinates you ; you cannot keep your eyes from him. 
You cannot shut this man up in your Arcadias ; you have no 
place for him there. As little can you drive this vision from 
the earth. I see the terrible spear of his adversary ; it trans- 
fixes him ; he gasps and dies — scymitar in hand, he dies. His 
dream is over. But what a dream it was ! How he suffered ! 
how he rejoiced ! how he wrought ! What patience in the tent ! 
Avhat rage in the field ! what movement ! v/hat passion ! what 
life I And his dream ends there — at this climax — on the spear's 
point. Where could it end more fitly ? 

But one of the combatants conquered. What has become of 
the victor ? He had swiftly descended from his steed, cut off 
the head of his expiring antagonist, and as swiftly regained his 
seat. And now he is scouring over the plain, with that marvel- 
lous head-piece swinging at his saddle-bow. So fight the gods 
of this lower world. 

CLARENCE. 

Oh, Seckendorf, you began well, inviting me to acquiescence, 



802 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

but you ended very treacherously. However, though I cannot 
pretend to find a place for this Tartar or Scythian in the Society 
of the Future, yet, as belonging to the Past, I assure you I too 
can look upon him with steady, unflinching vision, and with 
some sense of cordiality. 

SECKENDORF. 

You will find that the combat — that hostility in some form 
— follows you into the most artificial states of society. Pain 
and Pleasure, Love and Enmity — you will find these develop 
themselves together. Even the fine arts will tell you this. 
How poor a thing were music if it expressed only joy ! What 
act of heroism were possible if ignorance and hostility did not 
surround the heroic man. Every star lies upon the night. 

As a tribe of the desert is bound together by fear of some 
hostile tribe, so the most civilized nation owes the tenacity of 
its national union to the fears inspired by some other nation. 
And amongst the members themselves of the most peaceful com- 
munity, there is a consciousness that every man who does not 
love you, hates you, and this makes amity and mutual aUiance 
of tenfold value. 

Friendship, and the hand locked fast in mine, what can I value 
more ? But if all men are my friends, then have I no friend, 
left. The bond of friendship falls loose to the ground. You 
may fling the garland sportively over what head you will — and 
only sporti^ ely : there is no bondage in it any more. 

THORNDALE. 

Pain and Sorrow I admit are necessary to the development 
of all the higher forms of emotion. But I demur to the neces- 
sity of enmity. The utter indifference to you of a great multi- 
tude of strangers is, I am sure, enough to make a friendly hand, 
a friendly voice, of quite inappreciable value. 

SECKENDORF. 

There is no indifference. You are conscious yourself that 
you, in some measure, hate those cold and hard faces that pass 
you by in the streets of London. Yet every one of those cold, 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 303 

hard faces that challenges your enmity, that flings you its con- 
tempt, and only keeps the peace because there is not sufficient 
motive for war, has a friend on whom it smiles beneficent. A 
stranger in the streets of London feels that every man he meets 
is hostile to him. But let him only link his arm with one single 
friend, and he not only faces the crowd without dismay, but 
flings back its hostility with a gay defiance. Alone, I tremble, 
or I hate. Give me but one friend, and I dare the world ; I 
return its contempt with contempt, its derision with derision. 

But, to return to our animals, I beg to observe, for the con- 
solation of all susceptible minds, that this battle, this violence, 
this murder we see going on around us, is only the putting forth 
of the highest energies of life. And you may notice that ani- 
mals that graze, when their strength is at its highest, turn upon 
each other to exercise their horns, or tusks, or teeth in battle. 

THORNDALE. 

That life should be surrendered to support other life, is an 
arrangement one learns to understand as being upon the whole 
beneficent. But that some contemptible insect should feed upon 
another living animal, and that to its exquisite torture, (as some 
of us felt at the inn on the Righi the other night,) is an arrange- 
ment not so intelligible. The principle of the multiplication or 
abundance of life seems to be carried a step too far ; the new- 
comers interfering with the perfect state of the creatures already 
existing. I can never quite reconcile myself to the race of 
parasites. 

SECKENDORF. 

Not if you are still smarting from your wounds received that 
night upon the Righi. 

THORNDALE. 

Look now at yonder cow. Gentlest of creatures, she is 
grazing sedulously there, conscious of a large stomach to be 
filled before night-time. How incessantly she is interrupted in 
her most necessary work, and has to turn her head first to this 
flank and then to that, to dislodge those flies which her tail — 
that is allowed no rest at all — cannot reach. By-and-by some 



304 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

insupportable sting will drive her half mad across the pasture. 
In tropical climates, the pain inflicted by insects on the larger 
animals is described as terrible. I remember few things more 
vividly than a description Humboldt gives of a tropical night in 
South America. Night invites the ruminating animal to repose, 
but a multitude of insects choose this time for their own forage. 
" The agony," he says, " which the larger animals endure from 
the less is terrific : the air is filled with their cries. Man him- 
self does not escape. The miserable natives of some of these 
plains have to encase themselves in a plaster-coating of white 
clay!" 

SECKENDORF. 

Ha ! ha ! And if they move too much they crack, and their 
beautiful coat of mail will fall off from our lords of creation. 
But these are not exactly parasites. Their natural food is dead 
animal matter, in devouring which they do good service. They 
make inroads on the living animal, either because the supply of 
dead flesh runs short, or the sense which guides them to this 
food does not discriminate between the two. To the mosquito 
we are unfortunately undistinguishable from carrion. 

THORNDALE. 

We must get their carrion food and all corrupting matter out 
of the way, and so perhaps we shall control these pests — starve 
them out. But there is still the case of the regular parasite. 
The monkey, for instance, seems always to have a colony of 
fleas quartered on him. He has not a moment's " quiet posses- 
sion," as our legal phrase runs, of his own skin. A multitude 
of invaders, every one as vivacious as himself, are nestling in 
his fur, and boring into him with unremitting energy. 

SECKENDORF. 

If the monkey should go to law upon the subject, he might be 
told that he never had exclusive right to his own fur. That fur 
was never meant to keep warm one animal only. Such is not 
nature's economy. Besides, the monkey owes something of his 
activity, and something, no doubt, of his sociality, to this home- 
bred pest. The social development of monkeys seems very inti- 



ivAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 305 

mately connected with that mutual service they are constantly 
rendering to each other ; each kindly exploring his neighbour's 
fur, and keeping down an enemy who cannot be altogether ex- 
terminated. 

CLARENCE. 

Judging by personal experience, I should say that such a visi- 
tation could have no tendency to improve the temper of the 
monkey. I should be disposed to put it in as a plea and excuse 
for some of that spite he is said to manifest. Though I am far 
from saying that, upon the whole, monkeys are spiteful animals. 
A visitor to our zoological gardens is chiefly struck by their 
playfulness. They do not need the combat for the display of 
their power or agility. 

SECKENDORF. 

The games of animals are a simulated combat. Dogs pull 
each other about as if they were biting each other, and the pre- 
tended bite generally ends in a real one. And for the matter of 
that, a couple of boys may be seen pulling each other about in 
play, much like the two dogs ; and here, too, the real bite gener- 
ally ends the game. You hear the uproarious laughter suddenly 
change into a wail of passion. 

THORNDALE. 

Is it true of any race of monkeys, that when they go upon a 
foraging expedition, they plant one of their number as a sentinel 
to give warning of the approach of an enemy ? If so, there 
must be some understood compact between the sentinel and the 
rest. They must agree to give him a share of the booty. On 
no other ground can I believe that a hungry monkey would stand 
sentinel while the rest took the nuts. On the other hand, if our 
sentinel monkey deserted his post, martial law of the strictest 
kind would, no doubt, be executed upon him. 

SECKENDORF. 

I have had no opportunity of testing the truth of the story, and I 
never like to contradict the observations of others. At the same 
time, there are no class of men so given to see with the imagina- 



306 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

tion as naturalists. The temptation is so great to find an analogy 
to human conduct in the actions of the other animals, that I 
would not trust my own observation upon a single case, and 
where there was anything extraordinary in the fact. I should 
never build any reasoning on what I had observed only once. 

But in truth, the facts that lie open to every one are the most 
wonderful, are those that startle us most into reflection. Nor is 
it where animals differ from us, but where they resemble us, that 
they become the greatest source of perplexity. 

Your own little dog sees you, remembers you, loves you — does 
nothing but love — is a perfect cherub in all but form. Here you 
have, in the language of metaphysics, perception, memory, pas- 
sion ; and you cannot watch his actions for five minutes without 
giving him credit for some judgment. This carries you far 
onward in the development of a human mind. 

THORNDALE. 

Buffon has somewhere made the remark, that we should be 
much greater mysteries to ourselves if there were no other ani- 
mal on the face of the earth but man. I must confess, that what- 
ever other benefits we derive from the lower animals, they seem 
to me to make the nature of our own being still more mysterious 
and perplexing than it would have been if we had stood alone in 
creation. They help to civilize man. Ill could he spare these 
fellow-inhabitants. No horse to carry him \ no ox to plough for 
him ; no dog to keep him company ; no troop of birds to socialize 
the very air ; no gliding fish to animate the waters. It is not 
very clear how he would have ever civilized himself without 
them. But in the inquiry into our own spiritual or mental nature, 
they become very embarrassing objects. If there had been no 
other animal than man, with what confidence would he have 
looked upwards and around him ! How clearly would he have 
recognized in himself his own spiritual and godlike nature ! 

SECKENDORF. 

One is not quite so sure of that. He would have lost all that 
sense of elevation which arises from comparison with creatures 
in some respects similar to himself, but vastly inferior. In early 



LAST DAY WITH SECKEIs^DORF. 307 

times especially, the difficulty was to get the man to think highly 
of himself. Had there been no animals, he would not certainly 
have worshipped bulls, and apes, and serpents, but he might have 
worshipped still more devoutly the oak and the onion. The 
vegetable world might have seemed to him the especial manifes- 
tation of that god — which he does not first of all seek in himself. 
He might have thrown himself down at the foot of the tree, and 
worshipped there. 

CLARENCE. 

There must be some essential distinction between the con- 
sciousness of man and the consciousness of all other animals. 
What say you, Seckendorf, on the vexed question of Instinct ? If 
animals resemble us in their perceptions and their passions, they 
appear to have a different mode of Ideation. A bird builds a 
nest, who never saw a nest, and builds it as well the first year as 
the second. Is this some complicated play of sensibilities pecu- 
liar to the animal, prompting it to actions the result of which it 
does not foresee ? Or has the bird some peculiar mode of idea- 
tion, and so forms the imagination of a nest without being in- 
debted to its eyes or memory ? Both these theories have been 
upheld in our own times by very distinguished men. 

SECKENDOKF. 

I will explain to you this inventive instinct of animals, if you 
will explain to me that process of thought called invention in the 
human being. To me it seems they do not essentially differ. 
What we call invention in the man, seems to me to be a succes- 
sion of instincts ; what we call instinct in the animal, to be one 
limited or completed invention. 

I notice that, in speaking of human design, two very different 
things are often confounded. A watchmaker, who never in- 
vented anything in his life, is still said to make a watch from 
design ; he works after a type or pattern that he has learnt and 
studied, and which was the result of other men's invention. The 
watchmaker who invents a new escapement is also called a 
designer. But this last is the only case of invention. 

Now, when a mm\ first uses any means to an end, he does not 
work from experience ; he does something which he had never 



308 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

seen clone before ; lie thinks something which he had never 
thought before. What is this but a new combination of thought, 
of which he can give ns no possible account, except that it comes 
to him ? What is it but an instinct. 

When he acts a second time in the same way, uses the same 
means to the same end, we call it memory, knowledge. But 
now, if he adds other new means, and so complicates or advances 
his invention, what is this but a succeeding instinct ? The inven- 
tion comes to the man just as it comes to the bird, but it comes 
once for all to the bird ; it comes piecemeal, and again, and 
again, to the man. The instincts of the man are cumulative, 
and he is consequently a progressive creature. 

In works of natural theology, the word Design is used in the 
limited sense of working from a model. It is perhaps wise to 
keep out of view what is implied in the formation of the model 
itself. The first man who built up four walls of mud, and put a 
roof upon them to defend himself from the cold, had no type to 
work from. He and the bird were on an equality then ; they 
both worked from inspii-ation, and for the first essay the bird 
beat the man. The difference lies here, that the bird's instinct 
does all at once — the man's instinct works on, and still he has 
new inspirations. To speak more simply, the power of forming 
new combinations, which exhausts itself in one act in the bird, is 
repeated again and again by the man. 

Men have invented few things more surprising or more beau- 
tiful than the ship, as we now see it sailing along the sea. The 
shipwright who at this moment' proceeds to build such a ship, 
may never have designed or invented any thing in his life. He 
may be a mere copyist. The design of that ship from which he 
proceeds to work was a long while growing up — it grew by a 
succession of real inventions, of original combinations and new 
actions, which (if the word is permissible at all) may be called 
instinctive movements. 

The man lives in nature, but only to the nature of the man 
can we ascribe that he puts together thus, or thus, the objects 
presented him by nature. He saw that wood floated in the 
water — he sat astride upon the wood — he hollowed it into a boat 
— he bound pieces of wood together for a raft — he took advantage 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 309 

of the wind, and hoisted a sail — he contrived the paddle and the 
oar. At each step, here is an original activity you cannot ex- 
plain to me by experience. 

Then, again, let it be borne in mind that in those marvels of 
instinct, like the ant-hill and the bee-hive, where a result is 
brought about by the labours of many, we are not called upon 
to suppose that any one individual ant or bee has any conception 
of the whole commonwealth, and its relation to it. He has im- 
pulses, wants, appetites, that prompt to this or that action ; that 
harmonious result of the several labours of each, is probably 
produced without any consciousness of any such harmonious 
result. I suspect that the " oldest inhabitant " of the hive knows 
as little of that complicated polity which the naturalist so justly 
admires, as any single petal or anther in a flower knows of that 
order and arrangement which is the admiration of the botanist. 
Their society must be entirely, what human society is in part, 
the result of spontaneous impulses acting upon individuals them- 
selves, unconscious of any national result. 

THORNDALE. 

If it were not, we must give them credit for a power of mak- 
ing and observing laws fVir exceeding that of the best-ordered 
community of men. 

In short, you do not admit any radical distinction between the 
animals and man in this matter of instinct. Both have instincts, 
if such is the expression we are to use. The animal has a lim- 
ited mind that comes rapidly to its perfection ; the man has an 
indefinite growth of mind, or a developed succession of instincts. 
Well, I will think over this proposition. 

I like that idea which the comparative anatomist has given 
us, that, up to a certain point, the human being may be seen 
thrown piecemeal, as it were, upon the rest of the creation ; that 
in him such separate portions are gathered up and united. Here 
are animalcules which have just the life that the red corpuscles 
of the blood may be supposed to have. Other creatures are 
a mere stomach ; others grow and move, but have no special 
sense. If they have that of touch, they want that of vision. 
Others, again, have the marvellous eye, but no memory for any 



310 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

image it has given them. — What are you so intent upon, Clar- 
ence ? What botanical specimen have you gathered there ? Is 
it for the herbarium, or the sketch-book ? 

CLARENCE. 

For neither. I gathered this leaf of the wild hyacinth to 
look closer at the caterpillar that is crawling upon it. I wonder 
whether this worm here has any memory. It enjoys its slow 
movement over the green leaf, which it feeds on, and travels 
over, at the same time. I rather grudge him the leaf, but I sup- 
pose that the most ungainly insect that feels, belongs to a higher 
order in creation than the most beautiful plant. So let our cater- 
pillar eat his way onward without reproach. He has a sensa- 
tional life, of a quiet, not of a brilliant character ; I should not 
think he had memory. His relations with the external world 
are so few, simple, and constant, that he has no need or use for 
memory. Why remember the green food it fed on yesterday, 
or the moist earth it glided over ? The same moist earth and 
the same green food are present to the much more vivid sense. 
Always the same instinct suffices. It has nothing to learn, and 
the dangers that beset it are such as it could not possibly pro- 
vide against. Its little feet move at contact with the ground, 
and the mouth opens at the proximity of the stimulating diet. 
A few feelings — not a single thought — no personality — what a 
strange existence ! 

See ! he lifts his head into the air as if with some vague pro- 
phetic notion that he will by-and-by take possession of that 
element ; for he is but a sort of embryo all this while. The but- 
terfly could not be formed in the small Qgg', at least it was not: 
a little worm creeps out, and grows, as it feeds, into the butter- 
fly. And when one looks again, it fully justifies this embryonic 
character, sleeping and feeding much as if all its business was 
to grow. Soon it will coil and work itself into something like a 
larger egg, and there complete its growth — what we call its 
transformation. Wings will be given to this slow creature, and 
long and vigorous legs, and an eye of greater power, and a 
brain to correspond. Will it have memory then ? 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 311 

THORNDALE. 

Not much, I*am afraid, if, like its brethren of the moth tribe, 
it can again and again rush into the bright flame that burns and 
destroys it. 

CLARENCE. 

It feeds now upon the leaf; it will be sporting then from 
flower to flower. " A fairy passing through a garden," says my 
child's story-book, " plucked a blossom from the sweet-pea, and 
threw it sportively into the air; and the fairy bade it fly and 
feed itself on the nectar of other flowers. And so it did. And 
behold ! the seed that would have formed in the calix of the 
plant, formed in the body of the flying flower. But this seed, 
this egg, would not take root in the soil ; from it there crept a 
living moving stem, that grew moving on the face of the earth. 
And behold this stem became a bud or chrysalis, and from the 
bud came forth again the flying blossom. Seed, stem, bud, blos- 
som, are thus for ever put forth in succession by our living 
flower." 

SECKENDORF. 

Your child's story-book tells the matter prettily enough. 

CLARENCE. 

Is it not as if the type of the plant had been followed when 
nature proceeded to the insect ? — Do you think any thing satis- 
factory has been made out of the development hypothesis ? 

SECKENDORF. 

Which hypothesis do you mean ? The hypothesis that a 
change in external circumstances may have modified existing or- 
ganizations, and these modifications may have been transmitted 
to their posterity, will not carry us far in explaining that series 
of new creations which geology has revealed to us. You cannot 
explain in this manner the very structure, limbs, nerves, and 
susceptibilities of an animal. This operation of external cir- 
cumstances implies that certain organs and sensibilities are al- 



312 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

ready there. For instance, you may account in this way for 
many changes and modifications in the canine race ; but there 
must have been something of a dog to begin with ; you could 
not account for his four legs and his susceptible nose. 

CLARENCE. 

There must be a process o^ formative growth — growth of the 
very organism itself from some plasma — before w^e can come to 
the action of the inorganic world upon the organic. 

SECKENDORF. 

So it seems. Then there is the more modest hypothesis which 
the embryologist has suggested to us — that this process oi^ forma- 
tive growtli has been advanced from stage to stage by additions 
and varieties made in the embryo of some existing animal. This 
merely asserts that the egg, or the uterus, of an existing animal 
has been the workshop or scene of nature's plastic operations. 
Presuming that certain forms of animal life were coeval with 
our planet, then the new species wdiich have successively ap- 
peared are supposed to have been produced by a development 
or further growth of the embryo of an existing creature. This 
does not remove the operation of external circumstance, because 
the supposition is that this further development would not take 
place except under some appropriate change of circumstance. 
But it makes no attempt to show how change in external cir- 
cumstance could influence this process of formative growth. 

If we must have an hypothesis, I suppose this last is the best 
we can form ; but, for my own part, I have long ago learnt to 
remain simply ignorant where I can get no knowledge. 

CLARENCE. 

That new creatures have, from time to time, been introduced 
upon the earth, is, I suppose, indisputable. Now I cannot im- 
agine that some fine day a horse came flying through the air, 
down from the skies, like Ariosto's hypogriff — that it alighted 
on some green hill, there shook off its wings, and straightway 
began to graze. A flight of winged bulls, for instance, even 
with the aid of the Assyrian sculptures, I find a very difficult 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 313 

subject for the imagination. Nor can I acquiesce even in the 
picture which the poet gives us who saw the lion rising out of 
the earth — 

" pawing to get free 
_ His hinder parts." 

Therefore, if I am to form any conception whatever of an event 
that must have transpired on this earth, I know not what other 
to adopt than tliis which you have been last describing : That 
here and there, where the sun lay brightest, or where volcanic 
action had supplied some requisite change, or new material — 
where the suitable condition, in short, of the inorganic was found 
— nature pushed on her operation in this or that embryo of a 
living animal to some further stage of development. 

THORNDALE. 

Nature gives us no commencements ; most completely are all 
beginnings hidden from us. Men, when they framed their old 
cosmogonies, showed how strong is the disposition to begin at the 
beginning ; but at the beginning we never do begin. 

SECKENDORF. 

Neither beginning nor end do we ever catch sight of. Some 
small portion of the thread, as it passes from the distaflf to the 
shears, we handle and examine ; but to us it comes out of dark- 
ness, and goes into darkness. All our boasted science begins 
and ends in mere abrupt and blank bewilderment. 

Our physical science has no other basis than a sensation we 
have in common with that worm which Clarence is still admir- 
ing, and which feels, we presume, the resistance and support of 
the substance that it is crawling over. We can give just as 
little account of substance itself as that worm. Matter is to us 
that which we touch. Try and construct what shall seem a 
more positive or scientific definition, and you will find it labour 
in vain. We proceed with our science from just that point 
where we stand side by side with the worm. We take the clue 
in our hand from the same point, and cannot take a single step 
backwards, 

14 



314 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER YI. 

If you are puzzled and discontented with the definition of 
the atom, you perhaps fly to the more subtle notion of a force. 
Force shall be your first element. But what conception have 
you of physical force that does not resolve itself into the idea of 
motion'? And how conceive of motion unless you have some- 
thing to move ? You are driven back to the atom. 

You resume the atom, this minimum of substance or exten- 
sion; and you are involved again in the old perplexity; you 
have no minimum, you have no atom. 

THORNDALE. 

So then we begin our knowledge, as well as our life, where 
the worm begins, and it is the continuous development we are 
called on to admire in man. He is the summit of all animal 
life. Such view has its attraction, but I could never embrace 
it. I must not say that it leads to Materialism, for you will not 
know any thing about Matter in itself; but vital and mental 
projoerties are inextricably interlaced, and I have lost sight of 
the independent soul of man. 

SECKENDORF. 

Thorndale, have you ever seen an idiot — ever looked well at 
the creature as it stood before you — man in limbs, in senses, in 
appetites, in some passions — man no further ? Certain vital 
properties in that head of his are deficient. I think one idiot 
humbles us all. Here, in these beautiful valleys of Switzerland, 
amongst these sublimities of nature, is born the Cretin. He 
has, or may have, all his senses ; he can see, touch, hear, more 
or less perfectly ; but his brain is malformed, or an impure blood 
deteriorates its growth, or fails to supply some appropriate stimu- 
lant. He learns nothing; makes no more advance than the 
cattle in the stall ; child always, let his age be what it may. A 
pious Mahometan would tell us that his soul is in heaven, and on 
this account would invest the poor creature with a sort of sanc- 
tity. A strange superstition ! — gentle, if not wise. 

Meanwhile the disease of the Cretin is sometimes partially 
curable. As the physician conquers the malady — or a purer 
blood is produced — as this and that tissue is restored, or raised 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 315 

to its normal susceptibility — lo ! a glimmer of the soul appears ! 
The Mahometan would, I suppose, tell us that the physician is 
summoning it from heaven. To the physician it seems very 
clear that the animal health he has partially restored was that 
missing link in the great established ordei^ of development, with- 
out which there could be no higher thinking than the idiot had 
displayed. 

I pretend not to say what there is besides matter concerned in 
the human consciousness. I know not even what this matter is; 
but I do see this connection you speak of between vital and 
mental properties. And the difficulty of separating the two has 
been so felt of late, that I notice in more than one quarter a 
revival of the old hypothesis, that the soul is not that only which 
thinks and feels, but that vital power also which grows the very 
organism by which it feels and thinks. The hypothesis has at 
all events the merit of recognizing the only truth we really have 
attained — the necessity of this organism as a condition of con- 
sciousness. 

But on this beautiful summer day we will have nothing so 
crabbed as talk about materialism. Do I not constantly say that 
it is the Imagination — the power to combine what sense and 
memory give us into unrealities — that forms the vivacity and 
movement of our intellectual life; and shall I pass my days in 
disputing against these fair unrealities ? Delusion ! Why, the 
very best of human life is that which every one but the happy 
dreamer himself recognizes to be a delusion. What an egre- 
gious delusion is that exaggerated preference which the lover 
gives to one simple damsel beyond all others ! What a delusion 
is the love of fiame ! That posterity shall praise me ! That 
people who do not yet exist shall shout the name of one who has 
ceased to exist ! What a sublime folly ! Even the ambition 
which occupies our sternest manhood is often a chase after some 
dignity, title, position, which owes its charm to the imagination. 
What can mere ceremony profit a man ? If twenty men stand 
bareheaded in a row as I pass by, is my head any the warmer ? 
Perhaps I too must go bareheaded, for honour must be hon- 
ourably received. Yet for something like this the strongest 
of us all toil, and intrigue, and contend for years together. 



316 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

Throughout our whole existence our brightest moments are due 
to some conviction which we should smile at in another — some 
belief, which the calm and critical observer is pronouncing to be 
a delusion. From youth to age it is all alike. My Romeo 
begins his career by seeing Heaven's angel in a soft and silly 
girl, and ends it by descrying Heaven's messenger in a dull and 
stupid priest. I have seen a torpid, clownish, unclean man, 
impenetrable himself to any gleam of thought, infuse, by his 
mummery and his mumbling, such a rapture of hope in my poor 
dying patient — such an ecstacy and sense of beatitude — as all 
the professors in all the universities of Europe could not have 
distilled from their philosophy to reward the wisest and best of 
mankind. 

THORNDALE. 

O Seckendorf ! do let us have the truth — if we can get it, 
whatever sober or saddening aspect it may wear. If delusion 
comes in its stead, it comes to those who think it truth. Let 
Truth be mistress of the world to each one of us. 

If it be true that this marvellous organism is ourselves — is the 
very subject that feels, perceives, remembers — let us recognize 
this strange truth. I heard you say the other day, that the only 
statement you could make was simply this : " That certain prop- ■ 
perties do exist in certain organs, nerves, muscles, and that the 
combination of these makes the man ; it being, however, the lav 
of the organism, that each of these properties requires the coex 
istence of other organs and other properties — the organic bein; 
essentially a whole." According to this statement, the U7iity Oi 
my being is precisely of the same character as the unity of an 
organic creature on the face of the earth. A certain consensus 
or harmony of movements and sensations in a slug or a frog, 
constitutes the unity of that creature. A consensus of the same 
kind, though of far more numerous feelings, movements, &c., 
constitutes the unity of the man. 

"Well, I w^ould accept such a description of our nature if it 
seemed to me true, and follow it out to its legitimate conse- 
quences. But it is not true. My consciousness, at least, reports 
to me quite a different unity. I am one, because the same 



LAST DAY WITH SECKENDORF. 317 

personality — the same I myself — the same subject, as our meta- 
physicians term it, runs ever through all states of consciousness. 
This constant Ego, present in every cognition, constitutes my 
unity as man — as a thinking being. 

That this undeniable Ego thinks through, or by means of, a 
multifarious organism, seems also true. And if I once for all 
admit that the brain is, during this life, the indispensable instru- 
ment of thought, how can I be affected by the thousand instances 
you might bring before me of ill-health or cerebral injury influ- 
encing the current of my thought ? How can any array of facts 
of this kind compete with the constant ceaseless voice of my 
consciousness proclaiming at each moment the / am — proclaim- 
ing, in short, my spiritual being? Often have I said that I 
might be brought to join the school of Berkeley and of Fichte, 
but I could never understand that matter thinks — or that this 
body, which is in constant change — the very particles of matter 
that are supposed to be active in thought, flying ofiP even as the 
thought is produced — for a certain decomposition and recom-^_ 
position attends every vital function — that this body is the 
myself. 

SECKENDORF. 

found 
Every muscle constantly changes, yet continues to be a mijn the 
and a muscle that retains all the peculiar suppleness and p<^]3etter 
'which exercise had produced. "Matter cannot think — ii con- 
matter," as we hear it said, "cannot think." Certainly no 
Inert matter cannot move. It is moving matter that moves. It 
vis growing matter that, in the vegetable, grows. If your defini- 
tion of matter is limited to some one property, which all matter, 
at all times, displays, your definition cannot help us much. The 
property of extension leads us no farther — than the property of 
extension. If your definition is to embrace all properties, which 
matter at any time, under any circumstance, may manifest — 
mechanical, chemical, vital properties — then it is evident that 
such a definition must be the last result of all our knowledge. 
Whether the property of sensibility or feeling shall be added 
to those already enumerated, is precisely the question we should 
have to discuss. - 



cil8 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VI. 

I notice you adopt the expression so frequently used, the brain 
is the instrument of the mind. Be it so. But it is an instru- 
ment of that curious order that takes the initiative. 

You sleep, and in your sleep you dream. I need not point 
out the difference between the bodily condition of sleeping and' 
waking. Perhaps to describe all the points of difference would 
be a very difficult undertaking. Suffice it that there is a marked 
difference. And now, without disputing the existence of your 
spiritual ens, is it not evident that there is a very peculiar mode 
of thinking, the result of this peculiar condition of the vital 
organism ? 

I do not want to wrangle about words to which I can attach 
no distinct meaning. If you admit that the mind thinks only 
through the organism — that it thinks according to the condition 
of this organism — and that that condition is determined by 
organic or vital laws — you admit all the facts I have to con- 
tend for. 

What a long talk we have had ! and it has oscillated from the 
mimals to man with a regularity somewhat singular. We must 

eak up our camp. Come, Clarence ! — What are you extract- 

' from that leaf which you still contemplate so earnestly ? 
caterpillar, I observe, is gone. 

CLARENCE. 

riie leaf, they tell us, is the stem expanded ; the stem the 
closed leaf. Thus, then, by alternate folding and unfolding, an 
alternate sleeping and waking, does the plant grow. 

As the eye of the old man closes in his last sleep, the eye of 
some infant is somewhere opening for the first time to the light. 
Here also is a folding and unfolding, an alternate sleeping and 
waking, by which the earthly race of man has its growth. — 
Come, let us be going. 



CHAPTER VIL 

THE DIARY CONTINUED THE WATERS ARE DISTURBED. 

On laying down my pen after reviving these conversations 
with Seckendorf, I feel, too, a revival of those bewildering and 
painful uncertainties which I carried away Avith me from the 
conversations themselves. When I left my two philosophic 
champions, the one the champion of Hope, the other of Despon- 
dency, I cannot say, like the good pilgrim, that " I went on my 
way rejoicing ; " for I often paused, and often lost sight of even 
the marvels of art and nature which Italy was disclosing to me, 
whilst perplexing myself with questions which these two cham- 
pions had only made more difficult of solution. 



I carried them with me back to England ; and there I found 
that even my poet friend, Luxmore, had not escaped from the 
perplexity and bewilderment of our times. I cannot better 
express this perplexity than by recalling some of the wild, con- 
tradictory utterances of my poet. 

A true poet in his way of thinking, Luxmore threw himself 
energetically into the intellectual position of any writer who had 
succeeded in interesting him, and made it, for the time, his own. 
But a permanent, constant scheme of philosophy he never pre- 
tended to have attained. I am far from saying that this is the 
nature of all poets ; but with him, whatever was grand or new, 
or kindled his imagination in any way, was for the time cordially 
received. Perhaps I have been almost as much undecided as 
my poet-friend ; but there was always this difference between 
us : My indecision was a pain and suffering ; I stood torn by 
contradictory arguments, not knowing which camp to join ; while 



b2V BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

he rushed into the conflict with the first spear that offered itself 
to his grasp — fought both battles — and rode off to other fields 
and other fights. Such was his nature. He loved truth, but he 
loved excitement and emotion first of all. 

One of the last conversations I had with him as we sat to- 
gether in his rooms, surrounded by a heap of packages — he was 
preparing for that wilful voyage of his across the Atlantic — 
turned upon the nature (so far as we can penetrate it) of the 
human mind. I wish I could catch the half-philosophical, half- 
rhapsodical manner of the man. He spoke somewhat in this 
fashion, — 

" When I read the metaphysicians, I am a spiritual entity, a 
mysterious unit, a one indivisible simple essence, source to 
myself of my own ideas. I have entered into this body, into 
this world ; I am passing through into other worlds, perhaps 
into other bodies ; I am passing through, as the old Saxon king 
said, like the bird that flies across the hall, entering from the 
heavens at one window, departing to the skies at the other. I, 
in truth, belong to Eternity, and not to Time. 

" When I read the 'physiologists, I am still a glorious creature, 
but a creature of a quite different description. As I ascend, 
stage after stage, by the aid of the comparative anatomist, 
through the various developments of life, I start at finding that 
this vital organism is assuming higher and higher functions, till 
at length it seems to usurp the place of that spiritual entity I 
had presumed myself to be. There where I was accustomed to 
see the simplest of essences, my mysterious unit, I find the very 
height of complexity. The 'one and indivisible' seems now 
more like death than life — for it is now the unity of innumerable 
parts, movements, and susceptibilities, that constitutes my idea 
of a living creature. I tremble to think that man himself, in- 
stead of being free to come and go, a traveller through nature, 
may be himself a part of this great whole of nature — may 
belong to the world as much as the rainbow and the cloud belong 
to it, whatever semblance of freedom they put on. Man and 
nature are one. Nature is here that man may become conscious 
of it. The world is one creation, having its climax or final cause 
in the consciousness of man. 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 321 

"But why should I say 'I tremble to think?' Why use 
language of this kind ? If this, and no other, is the nature of 
my being, I will accept it for such as it is — accept with grati- 
tude — and acknowledge still that it is a most glorious being. 
We have these great ideas, great truths, great emotions, great 
aims, however they may be generated. Nor is religion absent. 
Religion — wiser men than I have said it — is not essentially the 
relation between this life and some other life of mine, but the 
relation between this very life and God the giver of it. Say 
that I transmit the great gift to my successor — gift not to be 
tarnished in my hands — say that I live but to the next sunset, 
the good is still the good, and the beautiful the beautiful, and 
God the giver of them both.-{^o man's religion, or morality, is 
worth much who does not love the good for its own sake, and 
hate the evil — in other words, who does not love love, and hate 
hate. 

" Look abroad through creation — from the lowest to the high- 
est, from the simplest to the most complex — all nature is one ! 
We speak — and naturally enough — of any animal existing here 
before us, as if it were a distinct and independent individual. 
But the multiplicity of relations between it and the surrounding 
inorganic world, are not less essential to its existence, than the 
rehitions between the several parts of its own organism. W^hat 
the animal is, feels, or does, depends at each instant on its re- 
lations with the earth, the air, the water, and the sun that rides 
high out there above us all. Take a vital organism and throw 
it into blank space — it is nothing. The vitality you place in 
the organic frame is not, but on condition of the greater inor- 
ganic frame that envelopes it — envelopes it as a body over a 
body. 

"And now look at man — the masterpiece of creation — and 
see how large a space and what a complicated universe he needs 
to exist in. Why, the whole world is as much his body as his 
own marvellous frame. Whence comes this light along which 
he lives and feels. Earth, and the wide air, and the flowing 
waters, are all parts of his being. Not a moment does he live 
without them : they are present with him in the highest flights 
of his imagination, in the most concentrated effort of his thought. 

14* 



S22 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER Vii. 

A tremor of the air upon a nerve is sound ; a tremor of some 
other ether upon some otlier nerve is light. Sound has become 
language, music, eloquence. Light has become beauty, art, and 
the written word. You read some philosophic page ; but that 
tremor of an ether which extends throughout the universe is the 
light of your eye, and has thus become the light of your under- 
standing. That impulse on a nerve, which was the mere sense 
of sound upon an infant's ear — that other touch, more gentle 
still, which was the sense of light upon an infant's eye — are 
with us when we hear or read the wisdom of the greatest of 
men. 

" Close tlie eye, shut up the ear, let the exquisite sense of 
touch die off the surface of the body, and what does even 
thought itself become ? — A mere dream. Is this the spirit you 
would preserve, if even you could carry it forth from the cham- 
ber where the lamp is flickering ? Why struggle to be this 
independent unit? It is the condition of your marvellous 
being, that it requires nothing short of a whole world for its 
development. Every living man, in order to preserve his indi- 
vidual existence, must, like another Atlas, carry off the entire 
planet on his shoulders. 

" One may say that the creation grows conscious of itself in 
man. What a glaring and absurd contradiction do our Byronic 
poets fall into, when they praise nature at the expense of man ! 
What is nature till man is there to feel and understand ? What 
are suns and stars, mountains and the ocean, without the human 
eye, and that which lies behind the eye ? What that is which 
lies behind the eye — marvellous brain, or something more — I do 
not precisely know; but I know this, that it both receives from 
the eye and gives to the eye. What if I am indeed no other 
than this fine bodily instrument made sensitive to a thousand 
impulses — what if I am indeed this ' living lyre,' swept over by 
every wind, and tremulous to every ray of light — living lyre 
conscious of its own melody ? I am still nothing less than that 
wondrous instrument that has converted motion into melody — the 
thing into a thought. Or, to change my metaphor, I am that 
sensitive mirror in which the reflected world becomes a conscious 
world, and knows itself as the creation of God. 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 323 

/ " Think M^hat a divine creature man is ! He alone admires. 
He alone embraces the whole, and is conscious of the divine 
idea. Other creatures are beautiful and happy, but they know 
not how beautiful they are. They love, but they know not how 
lovely love is. The tree amidst all its beauty lies hidden from 
itself; the bird is shrouded in its own music, as the tree amidst 
its own leaves. It knows nothing of the wood, but the shelter 
it gets from it ; nothing of the ringing harmonies around, but its 
own joy which it pipes incessantly through all. It is only when 
some poet comes, looking, loitering, listening, that all this beauty 
of the leafy wood, and all this happiness, is revealed and felt. 
God re-creates his world in the consciousness of man. In us 
it is that he finally accomplishes his divine idea. 

" I see the poet ; I see him lying by the borders of his lake. 
Just where the land curves out a little, just where the old ash- 
tree, half covered with its ivy, throws its branches down along 
the translucent water, I can see my meditative poet. The lake 
undulates about him — more like light than water — and as he 
looks into the tree above his head, the softest lustre imaginable 
is playing amongst the leaves ; it is the reflected light glancing 
upward from the lake. The waters are moving round him with 
no steady current, and no perceptible wind, but eddying about 
with a silent, uncertain, mazy movement ; a liquid living laby- 
rinth most mystical to a museful man ; undulating, as I said, 
more like light than water. Further off in the distance, the 
lake lies still as the azure sky itself. And see what a world of 
beauty those mountains opposite have thrown down upon it ! 
There they rise, clad in purple heather, and in many softer hues, 
gathered from the air and the shadow of a passing cloud ; and 
they give all to the lake, and by their reflected grandeur make it 
deep and capacious as the heaven is high, and fill it with the 
noblest forms of the upper air. What a depth of space does 
that shadow of the mountain scoop out beneath the surface of 
the lake ! But mountain and shadow, and lake and tree, are all 
for him^for him. These wonderful creations of unconscious 
space are born again, and have their full and complete existence 
in the poet's mind. For him, and in him, all this beauty lives. 
The mountain becomes a grandeur only in his thoughts ; as it 



324 BOOK IV.-CHAPTER VII. 

exists in the unconscious air, it is mere bulk and measurement. 
I see my poet, leaning on the moss-covered rocks, looking at it 
all aslant. And hosts of little wild-fiowers are peeping into his 
eyes. They, too, would live ! They, too, will become a con- 
scious loveliness if he but looks on them. He does look. Every 
thing in creation has its accomplished and exalted being in the 
consciousness of man. If the silent waters move mystically, if 
the murmuring w^aters murmur peace, if the torrent and the 
waterfall speak of power, it is only as they flow and murmur 
through his thoughts. In him they become mystery, and peace, 
and power. 

" But the poet departs. He vanishes like the mist ; he 
withers like the leaf. Ay, but another and another poet will 
lie on those moss-covered rocks. This living man will transmit 
his life. He will improve it as he transmits. His life is always 
the greater in just such proportion as he can feel himself one 
in the great wdiole of Humanity." 



After a pause, in which Luxmore had been busily occupied in 
cleaning and loading a brace of pistols, he broke out again, and 
in a very different strain. The revolvers had evidently some- 
thing to do with the transition. 

" See here ! " he said, " I am prepared to defend my little 
spark of life by blowing mto dust and ashes any one who assails 
me. 

" It won't do, Thorndale ! This impersonal and Pantheistic 
way of thinking does not accord with nature ; not, at least, with 
the nature of an Englishman. We live self-centred. / am 
more than a life ; I am the somewhat who has the life, and 
means to keep it. This little word / has a wonderful meaning 
and potency in it. All our heroism or greatness dies out if this 
little word loses its power with us. VWhat is our immortality but 
a sublime egotism ? The old Saxon king spoke best : We flutter 
in at the one window, and spread our wings, and fly forth at the 
other, into infinite space. I shall keep my faith in the mystical 
I. Each individual man stands eternally face to face with a 
created nature. He receives it all, learns from it all, and stands 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 325 

also in clear contrast to it all. That seeming contradiction is the 
secret of his greatness. There you have my ' last word.' " 



^ How little is life I How great are the problems of life ! Man 
is nothing, man is infinite. AYe are all children — but children 
playing on the shore of the great ocean. 

I believe, I meditate on God ; and as the idea enlarges, I ^nd 
I believe in nothing hut God. Then I am told that this is as bad 
as not believing at all. 



Seckendorf would have us look up to the same old glories, 
through the same old tears. But then the condition is, that we 
must still weep like children, and see like children. 

Children we may be, but someivhere there is a maturity to be 
reached. 

We shall die, and never have known what manner of being 
God is ! This very thought assures me of an Immortality. 



Yet the question arises — May not my aspirations after higher 
knowledge and higher life be realized by the future inan ? May 
not their very purpose be to stimulate the race of man onwards 
to its destined perfection or maturity ? I may die ; but these 
thoughts of mine, they do not die : they live for ever ; they are 
revived for ever, growing again, and growing more luminous, in 
successive generations. My thoughts no more die than this 
scene of nature (which is here that it may become a thought in 
living men) will die because I depart from it. God and his 
universe exist, and whatever in me is worthy of preservation 
will continue to exist. What is this / that must be eternal ? 

Hear the Earth-spirit sing : " My hills rise higher, into skies 
more beautiful ; my ocean and my rivers roll purer waters ; ray 
animals are more graceful, and thrill with more joyous life than 
in olden times. My antelopes bound over the plain, my birds 
sing in the clear air ; every valley grows to be a Paradise ; and 



326 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

the rationally happy race — the last thing accomplished — is slowly 
forming and moulding itself. My earth will then be complete, 
mature — it will take its place, intelligent, and wise, and grateful, 
in the great choral hierarchy of the heavens." 



/ God 7iever pardons : the laws of his universe are irrevocable. 
God always pardons : sense of condemnation is but another 
word for penitence, and penitence is already new life. 



I weary of this conflict — of this eternal wrangle of my own 
thoughts. Silence ! I crave silence, peace, and a pause to this 
incessant din and tumult of reflection. There is silence deep 
enough in the air around me. But who shall still for me this 
loud and contradictory talking that is perpetually going on 
within ? 



Oh, for the voice of a friend ! — for one half-hour, Luxmore, 
of your genial, variable, animated talk ! Plow you threw aside 
the oppression of our doubts in your plenitude of life, and your 
gratitude to the Giver of life ! Where are you now ? Are you 
at the Andes ? Or have you " worked your way round " to 
that farm on the Mississippi ? Perhaps on the swiftly-flowing 
waters of the Mississippi you may be floating along ; — hardly 
resting on its banks. 

Wherever you may be, on land or ocean, would I were wan- 
dering with you ! " Life — with but health and nature ! " — you 
used to exclaim — " is a most glorious gift. There is a piety in 
joy !" — Not yours a thankless spirit. 



" Life, with but health ! " — As I pass in my ride some group 
of lazzaroni or fishermen, their limbs idly spread out upon the 
quay, and often asleep or basking in the sun, I cannot but envy 
them those strong limbs, that vigorous health, those broad lungs 
that play so freely and so perfectly that the possessor knows not 
if he has lungs or not. I wish that, without injury to that 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 327 

brawny sleeper, I could borrow his breathing apparatus for a 
time — his noble chest, his thews and sinews. Oh, stuff me, 
thought and all, into the body of some sailor lad, who from the 
mast-head is shouting " Land ! " Let me, too, be abroad upon 
the world, shouting and gazing, seeing all its wonders, sharing all 
its strife and energy. 

As Luxmore said, it seems like a disgrace to die and n^ver 
to have seen a tropical landscape. Well — if not mine — yet 
other eyes see all the grandeur of this earth we dwell in. Even 
at this moment other and stronger men than I — stronger in mind 
and body — see it all. This joy is not lost. It is, and will con- 
tinue to be. Why must it be 7m7ie f Even at this instant, 
while I write here, slowly and in pain, how many a young heart, 
and vigorous limb, and fresh vision, is beating, bounding, kind- 
ling throughout the world. There is immortal youth amongst us. 



I do not want to see the tropics. It is a very different 
scene, and a much more homely landscape, that I sigh to be 
transported to. 

What is it has unhinged me ? / must not weary of solitude. 
There is no choice now, and no room for that indecision which 
ever makes a full half of all our calamities. There is but one 
simple necessity — to endure on here to the end. And the end is 
not far off. 

All this day long have I been wandering amongst the shady 
lanes, the hedgerows, the cultivated fields of England. The 
green meadow rises before me ; it can hardly retain its distinc- 
tive colour of green for the multitude of wild-tiowers, golden, 
and white, and purple, that are blossoming all over it. Such a 
meadow, bounded by a row of tall elm-trees in full leafage of 
deeper green, and overshone and overshadowed by our beauti- 
fully clouded and ever variable skies — this surely is a landscape 
one might live in for ever. I weary of this eternal blue — of sea, 
and sky, and mountain — and of these dark olive-trees which 
seem never to have known either a winter or a spring. Would 
that I could tvander once again in an English field of corn, or of 



328 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

those bell-like oats that Lux more once said were " music to the 
eye ! " I would exchange all these sublimities for an English 
hedge — dearer to me than all the tropics. I see it before me as 
I used to lie under it when a boy. I could build it up in mem- 
ory, every leaf of it. First came the little foss — call it ditch if 
you Avill — but it is quite dry, and distinguished only by a thicker 
grass ; then from the further side rises a green bank, sloping 
gently, and covered all over with innumerable tribes of dehcate 
grasses and white starry flowerets. On this stands the sturdy 
hawthorn, intermingling leaf and thorn — cheerful, vigorous, self- 
defensive. For all its thorn, it is tangled ov^r with woodbine, 
and the small pink and blushing convolvulus which runs in and 
out, and, with all its modesty, always contrives just not to hide 
itself Last of all, on the very summit, the wild-rose clusters, 
and tosses its flowers, and seems to laugh with giddy joy, as it 
scarce holds on against the breeze that is toying with its blos- 
soms. How pleasant it was to recline at full length upon the 
grassy bank, looking down into the wonders of vegetable and 
insect life that it disclosed ! A spot I could have covered with 
my hand seemed, when you pried into it, to be a whole world 
in itself. 

What would I give to be transported to that park ! — to row 
the boat once more upon that river ! — once more to stand linger- 
ing in that shrubbery ! Ah ! not on me must fall the malady of 
the Swiss ! I shall never see England — never see her again ! 



Oh health ! health ! how precious and how little prized ! 
This weakness is more than weakness, it is pain and distress. 
With me the powers of life do not die down evenly or together. 
It is the nature of my complaint. The brain struggles last and 
longest against the encroachments of decay ; and thus decay is 
felt. Hand and foot desert me before the wish to exert them 
expires. The pen will be laid down before the thought. Fare- 
well for me — not the big plume of war — but this poor feather of 
a pen that I once hoped would accomplish something. Pre- 
sumptuous wish ! 

What a useless life has been mine ! Useless and toilsome. 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 329 

Cyril has been with me. Like a good Catholic he has been 
harping on his favourite theme, the necessity of submitting the 
reason, by an act of obedience, to the teaching of the Church 
and of the sacred volume. He comes to me in a quite mission- 
ary spirit. It is this act of submission, he thinks, I stand pre- 
eminently in need of. If, as Seckendorf said, " one could cease 
thinking ! " — or think his thoughts and not my own ! — it would 
be doubtless a good exchange — only it happens to be impossible 
to make it. 

Curious ! how he blows the trumpet about what he calls his 
" Principle of Revelation," which he says the Protestant only 
half accepts, or altogether violates. The Protestant will receive 
implicitly the doctrine when he has satisfied himself of the evi- 
dence of the miracles wrought to confirm it. But as the nature 
of the doctrine, to confirm which a miracle was wrought, must 
enter for something into the question whether the miracle was 
wrought at all, we find, he says, the Protestant in reahty can- 
vassing the doctrine under pretence of sifting what he calls the 
historical evidence : thus, in fact, making his own reason the final 
judge, and departing from implicit obedience to the revelation. 

But, my dear Cyril, I suppose men must, or ought to under- 
stand what they believe, and what is understanding any system 
of doctrines but examining it ? Your " principle of revelation " 
must necessarily be subordinate to the mental laws of that being 
whom God has created as well as taught, and taught in creating. 

I was obliged, in my turn, to lay down the law, and show him 
the limited action of his " principle of revelation." I said : 
" When men have formed a language suitable for such a pur- 
pose — (I beg you to reflect what previous knowledge and thought 
is imphed in this) — when men have framed a language suitable 
to the purpose, it is conceivable that a system of doctrines might 
be enunciated authoritatively by one who wrought miracles in 
proof of his divine authority. But even then, the doctrines he 
enunciates cannot be apprehended as truths, if they contradict 
each other, or contradict other truths which also are given us by 
God. I defy all the Cardinals and all the Bishops in the world, 
in conclave assembled, to controvert this simple statement." 



330 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

When Cyril boasts of his implicit obedience, he is but con- 
gratulating himself, in fact, on the steadfast predominance of a 
pious disposition. It is in the supremacy of a devotional senti- 
ment that he finds his rest and stability. Happy those who have 
happy natures — loving and devout. 



Seckendorf, in his own dry, unsatisfactory, yet impartial man- 
ner, would say: "There are natures so finely tuned to love and 
\ ^ reverence, that only in an imaginary world could they find the 
fit and constant objects for their love and their devotion. I 
have known such natures — chiefly amongst women. They have 
but one want — a devoted love ! Where on earth can they be- 
stow this — on what object from which some day it would not be 
flung back to them — flung back by the hand of death, if by no 
colder hand ? " 

And again he would say : " Depend on this, that there is at 
least no danger to these great Faiths from the efforts of a literary 
class. What changes may take place from below — either as the 
result of some social change, or from the volcanic eruption (so 
to speak) of new superstitions — let no one pretend to predict. 
But the literary class will effect nothing ; for this plain reason, 
that they are always divided amongst themselves, and that every 
age is sure to contradict its predecessor. You cannot overthrow 
a Church in one generation ; and the second generation of lit- 
erary men never repeat their predecessor's reasoning — they 
assail it. 

"Vanity, or love of reputation is the great motive of the 
literary class. If Truth determines what a man thinks, it is 
vanity decides what he shall write. Each great teacher traces 
out his road, and builds his triumphal arch upon it ; but the 
next that comes plans a new road, or pulls down the triumphal 
arch — for all the world he would not walk under it. The lit- 
erary men of the eighteenth century assailed the Church ; their 
successors of the nineteenth century supported it. They were 
half afraid of the victory that seemed placed in their hands, but 
still more disgusted with it as the achievement of others. When 
all the honour has been reaped of saying any thing, there is only 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 331 

one way of obtaining reputation, that of skilfully zmsayino- it. 
The same man often tries his hand at destruction, and then at 
reconstruction of the very thing he had destroyed. Witness 
your Coleridge and others. And as this last requires the great- 
est ingenuity, it is the task which brings him the greatest honour. 
Free-thinking has become shallow and superficial ; all the deep 
and profound philosophy, as it is called, is now ranged on the 
side of the Church. I do not know what is going on in InQia 
and amongst the Brahmins, but I will confidently predict, that if 
a literary class should arise to dispute the mysterious sacredness 
of the water of the Ganges — long before their teaching will 
have had any effect upon the faith of the people, there will be 
another literary class who will hold up their predecessors as 
shallow and ignorant pretenders, and will prove, by many pro- 
found reflections, that there is a mysterious power of salvation 
in the water of the Ganges." 



Throwing one's self cordially upon life as it is — in the manner 
of Seckendorf, or, still better, of my poor friend Luxmore — 
asking from it, not Eternal Truth, but simply what treasures it 
can reveal of Hope, of Love, of most sacred Thought and Emo- 
tion — it becomes then a scene full of incessant interest. 

We do hope — and most amazing things we hope for — that is a 
certain fact. But has experience taught us that what we hope 
will therefore be realized? The experience of most men, of 
most old men, has taught them that hope, or hopeful action, was 
itself the fairest reality of life. Yes, we hope on and on ; and 
though at every station we come to, we perceive that Imagination 
had thrown its illusions before us, we still trust to the glories of 
the station beyond ; and when we have reached the very gulf of 
darkness itself, Hope throws her bridge across, and travels stead- 
fastly along it, though it is thin and sharp, says the Prophet, as 
the edge of a sabre. Hope travels over it into regions beyond. 

Hope, in some subtle form, is with us constantly. I find that 
this sentiment mingles with, and enhances, our feeling of the 
Beautiful. I see it in that gleam of light that decoys me into 
the opening forest, or leads me down the long avenue. Hope is 



332 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

flying with the lights and shadows that course alternately along 
the landscape ; it will play for a whole summer's afternoon amidst 
the clouds, or on the summits of the hills. I think a certain 
vague sentiment of expectation, or hope, forms one of the most 
constant elements of scenic beauty. Yes, and our chase after the 
picturesque may perhaps suggest a moralizing strain applicable 
to all our chases in life. 

Look you — just where the winding river is lost to the eye — 
just where the circling path curves round the hill — Plope stands 
and beckons. You follow, and the river still winds, and the 
path still curves. The perfect charm was there where you stood 
— if to stand still were possible — with all that beauty before you 
of the winding river, and Hope suggesting still greater where it 
was lost to sight. 

Or you ascend, perhaps, some wooded hill, and through the 
foliage catch delightful glimpses of the lake below. Hope, at 
your side, holds up the horizontal branches of the fir-trees, and 
reveals to you, imperfectly as it seems, a scene full of beauty 
and of expectancy. Seen half-way up the hill — and but half 
its surface seen — how perfect is that sun-illumined lake ! But 
you climb in hot haste to the summit that you may see it all — 
that the whole expanse of its waters may be revealed to you as 
you look fairly down upon it. Well, you see all — and you have 
lost all. The delightful lake, with all its witchery of light and 
hope, is gone, and a flat, dead, unmeaning pool of water lies 
below you, which you measure with your eye from side to side. 



^'"^ We are such social beings withal, that we catch the hopes and 
fears of others, and sigh for we know not what, because others 
have longed for it — because others will applaud us for longing 
and for striving. What feith a child has in the promise of its 
parent ! It is some novel pleasure it knows nothing of, but the 
promise fills it with delight. And half the glory of attainment 
is always to proclaim — I have attained ! 

A Buddhist saint sits motionless under lijs Bo-tree to earn 
Nirwana. What is Nirwana ? He does not know. I am sure 
he does not know ; for there is no possible object of cognition in 



THE DIARY CONTINUED. 333 

his mind. But he knows this, that there is a crowd around him 
whispering wonder and admiration at his near attainment of 
Nirwana, and therefore he sits kilhng out his natural Hfe for this 
dream, this word Nirwana. He has heard the mysterious word 
pronounced with reverence from youth upwards ; he has heard 
it explained by other words quite as remote from any signifi- 
cance, and he never hears it without having the profoundest 
feeling excited in his mind. Emotion he has, but no idea 
attached to the word. What is it to be absorbed into the Divine 
essence ? It is tantamount to annihilation if it means any thing, 
for the maddest of men never supposed that, when he ceased to 
be man, he was to become God. 

We read that it is the dread of being retained for ever in 
the circle of existence — of ever-changing life — that constitutes 
the chief motive for the acquisition of Nirwana. By aid of his 
doctrine of metempsychosis, of certain grave charges against a 
corrupt and corrupting matter^ and a gloomy view of existence, 
the Buddhist doctor has converted all nature into one vast wheel 
of torture, on which the sad soul is bound for ever — unless it so 
far subdues the influence of matter as to be worthy of Nirwana. 
Thus only can it hope to be unbound from this huge Ixion 
wheel. Such view of God's creation a Buddhist doctor had 
attained ! 

It is not a wheel of torture : there is happiness in the world — 
only it is from its nature brief, changeful, transitory. It comes 
and goes, and defies all calculation. 

To be happy systematically — to make others happy systemati- 
cally — this, I fancy, is rather a mistake. 

The spirit of joy — I see it dancing in ragged children, with 
naked feet, on the hard wet pavement of the streets of London. 
I see it gliding queen-like across the carpeted saloon. In what 
furrow, behind what wave of the sea, will you find this halcyon 
bird ? In what furrow w^ill you not ? This only I know, that 
wherever found, it will not long remain : no sea so rough as not 
to afibrd it shelter, and none so calm as to induce it to rest. It 
flies — but only to light elsewhere. Oh heavens ! to think how 
slight a thing — when we are young, when we are young — can 



334 BOOK IV.— CHAPTER VII. 

make us supremely blest ! A few notes of melody floating in 
the air — a word or a look from one that is loved — and what a 
tumult of joy. 



Love ! Love ! What exquisite forms does it assume ! Men 
are surprised at a very early and precocious attachment like that 
of Dante. I am not surprised. See how a little child will love 
a bird. How the child longs to caress it — only to hold it lov- 
ingly in its own two hands. Simple, pure, and exquisite feehng. 
Dante must love something, and if Beatrice was there, it must 
be Beatrice. The bird and the flower cannot understand our 
love, and return it like the Beatrice. 

There is for this reason always some sense of repulse and dis- 
appointment in our love of nature. The poet who saw in the 
beautiful laurel a transformed nymph, whom not even the god 
could now approach, expressed a feeling we have all experienced. 
There is the imprisoned Daphne in every graceful tree. How 
it attracts, and yet repels ! 



^ Poets sometimes think they love, when they are only loving 
to think. Their own imagination is dearer to them than any 
woman upon earth. 



Ask of nature any happiness you can conceive, and she will 
give it, — only do not ask it to be permanent. You shall live, if 
you will, " along the hne of limitless desire," but desire itself will 
sometimes die away in you. Life and change are synonymous 
terms. We sigh for calm till we have it, and then sigh deeper 
than we ever sighed before to escape from it. 

That beautiful moon which is now shining upon me is our 
favourite type of an unbroken calm and tranquillity. It is a bet- 
ter type than we suspect. The astronomer tells us that it is the 
most barren spot he knows of in the universe, — rock and extinct 
volcano. No life stirring there. Very fit type for eternal calm ! 



BOOK V. 

CLARENCE ; OR, THE UTOPIAN. 



" Oh, when shall all men's good 
Be each man's rule? " 

Tennyson. 



^ 



CHAPTER I. 

A NEW INTRODUCTION TO AN OLD FRIEND. 

Sitting in the gardens of the Villa Reale to-day, there was 
one group that especially drew my attention, — a father, and, as 
it seemed, his little daughter. The gentleman was tall, young, 
handsome, his demeanour slightly reserved, his expression highly 
intellectual. He surveyed the crowd with an air of a calm spec- 
tator ; you saw at once he was an Englishman. The little girl, 
if I had seen her alone, might have perplexed me. With fair 
complexion and light hair, she yet had the dark and lustrous eye 
of the Italian. But the pure bell-like accent with which she 
spoke her English, proved that she too must have been a native 
of our island. She walked, or stood, by the side of her father as 
if she too partook of that reflective habit and quiet reserve which 
could be read upon his countenance. 

It was Clarence ! I started — then reseated myself. He saw 
me, or looked my way, but he did not recognize me — so thin and 
pale has this illness left me. 

Why did I not call, or make some sign, or send some messen- 
ger to him ? It seemed at the moment that since he had not 
seen me, it would be better to make no sign. He is passing 
through Naples as a tourist and a sketcher — it would be a hin- 
drance to him, and a waste of time, if I dragged him up here to 
a sick man's room. And then he would come and go away, and 
leave the place blank and solitary. I know of old that the her- 
mitage must not be often broken into, if it is to keep the sad sort 
of peace it shelters for us. 

I contented myself with watching the pair. The little girl 
was evidently of a very sensitive temperament. Near to where 
I was sitting is a statue — of the goddess Flora, as I guess j 
15 



338 BOOK v.— CHAPTER I. 

and within the iron fence by which the statue is surrounded 
grow some very beautiful specimens of that fair kingdom over 
which the goddess presides. To this spot came the little girl, 
attracted by the flowers. Impatient to approach them, she yet 
would not relinquish the hand of her father for a moment, but 
did the best she could to drag him forward. To have reached 
them alone would not have satisfied her ; it was plain that she 
had made some discovery she wanted him to share. He, on his 
side, stooped down to hear all she had to say about those mar- 
vellous flowers ; and the earnest prattle of the bright, excited 
child, interested him I could see, far more than any thing else in 
the Villa Reale. 

As the two passed me my heart was strangely stirred, — not, I 
am sure, with any thing that would bear the name of envy, but 
with something very like regret. I shall leave the world, and 
never shall have known that happiness — the caress of a child ; 
never known what it is to hold a little loving, lovable creature 
in your arms that calls you father. I have walked through the 
earth alone. No dear head has ever leant upon my shoulder. 
No child has ever taken shelter in my bosom. 

Was thinking all ? Should not life be a loving also. 



Oh, what beautiful things there are in life ! And I have missed 
them all ! Look you, the man and the woman have travelled 
through the round of pleasures ; the road is becoming somewhat 
stale and wearisome ; it is to be gone over and round again, and 
you see it will soon be to them a beaten and barren track. Must 
they beat it harder still ? Or must their own spirit sink to the 
level of this dearth and monotony ? No : there comes a little 
child, a toddling infant, and the man and woman, with this charm- 
ing puppet for a companion, travel the circle of the year again, 
and find it all new. They gave life to the child, and the child 
has returned the gift, and rendered them back their youth. 

Yes ! what beautiful things there are in life I joys that have 
come down to us pure and unstained from the times of the 
patriarchs. It is to me an eternal miracle to see the same roses 
year after year bloom as freshly as they did in Paradise. Plant 



A KEW INTRODUCTION TO AN OLD FRIP:ND. 339 

this wedded happiness, plant these roses, in every rood of ground, 
ye who would improve the aspect of this world ! but do not think 
you can change a single leaf of the plant itself. 

Progress ! progress ! But, Clarence, there are some things 
you can as little improve as you can those charming trees, and 
rivers, and hills that you love so much. I can tell you that he 
who, in any age, in any region, has sat himself down beside one 
of those gentle streams that are flowing upon the earth — (^e 
abode from time immemorial of rushes and the water-lily, of 
meditation and of peace) — he who has sat down there with one 
bosom friend to share his meditations and his love — has enjoyed 
all that the coming centuries can bestow on the best, the wisest, 
the happiest of our posterity. The last of the race can receive 
no gifts more precious than those we see around us — this beau- 
tiful nature and human fellowship. Like us he will have this 
pleasant earth to live upon ; like us he will look up into this sky 
above his head — this most bright, transparent and impenetrable 
sky. 

Sit down now, O restless thinker ! and enjoy now — for here 
it is — the Elysium you love to prophesy. He to whom God 
has given to feel the wonder and the beauty of this world — to 
have calm thoughts, and a dear friend to tell them to — has all 
that flowing centuries can bring. He stands already at the end 
of Time. He has forestalled your most remote futurities — he 
has all the heaven that a man can have. 



In my ride this morning, Bernard, who acts as charioteer, and 
who knows something of my taste for a vieiv, and when to halt, 
and where to proceed slowly, brought the carriage to a stop in 
the front of a villa which certainly commanded an admirable 
prospect. But there was something within the villa which at 
that moment more deeply interested me than the prospect. The 
window was open, and I could see sitting there the same little 
earnest prattler I had noticed in the gardens of the Villa Reale. 
She was very silent now, and very busy, leaning, in fact, over 
her copy-book, marvellously intent upon up-stroke and down- 
stroke. Clarence was sitting by her side. He had left his easel. 



340 BOOK v.— CHAPTER I. 

which I saw standing at the further end of the room, to see how 
the studies of this young artist were proceeding. The long 
silken tresses of the little girl had fallen upon her paper, much 
to the embarrassment of her penmanship. She had shaken them 
aside several times, and they had as frequently returned. Her 
father had come to the rescue, and, putting his arm round her 
neck, had gathered up in his hand this silken, golden treasury ; 
and, both for its own sake and for what the pen and ink were so 
laboriously accomplishing, kept it out of harm's way. It was a 
charming picture. No gallery in all Italy could show its equal. 
The beautiful child sate absorbed in its task with that entire 
singleness of purpose which childhood only knows ; nor was 
there less beauty in the graceful figure and fine intellectual head 
of Clarence. He was still dwelling on trains of deeper thought 
of his own, but yet had attention to bestow on the studies of this 
sweet companion. He could feel a quiet undercurrent of ex- 
quisite pleasure as he held in his hand those clustering locks, 
and kept them from embarrassing the little scribe. 

" And now," said the sage preceptor, as the last letter of the 
copy stood fair upon the page ; " and now, Julia, what does 
h-o-r-n spell ? " 

There was a pause, and the question was repeated — " What 
does h-o-r-n spell ? " 

" Oh, I know," exclaimed the pupil, with a sudden flush of 
confidence, " it spells — trumpet ! " 

" That's what it may mean^' said her tutoi-, giving a kiss to 
hide the smile upon his lips. — I was so charmed with this scene 
that I almost resolved to break in upon it, and claim my part in 
the friendship of Clarence ; but at this instant Bernard put his 
horse, in motion, and drove on. Better as it is, I thought to 
myself. Clarence is kind. If he once found me out, he would 
derange his own plans, and fetter himself to do a service to the 
invalid. This I should regret. Better as it is. 



I like that spelling lesson, and the smile, and the kiss, and 
the confidence of the little blunderer, and the kind clear explana- 
tion which I am sure followed. Many a child as innocently and 



] 



A NEW INTRODUCTION TO AN OLD FRIEND. 341 

as ingeniously blunders, and some stupid, harsh old woman beats 
it ! Veritable old witch ! 

Nay, learned pedagogues are sometimes as bad as the old 
woman. Why should not love, rather than hate, be cultivated 
by the process of tuition ? Angry at the very dithculties of his 
task, many a schoolmaster vents his passion on the poor pupil 
whom he has failed rationally to instruct. He encounters re- 
sistance of some kind, and proceeds to overcome what he de€ras 
a culpable obtuseness by force. His authority at least is sus- 
tained, and that with him is much. The master does not retire 
beaten from the field : the pupil does. There is a moral fitness 
in that. Meanwhile blows make nothing intelligible, and anger 
kindles anger, and the boy retains his stupidity, and adds to it 
his hatred. 

Why have I avoided Clarence ? — But I have made the same 
blunder all my life. 

Nothing surely condemned me to the isolation in which I 
have passed my existence — which I must now endure to the 
end. I had committed no crime — incurred no disgrace ; why 
this self-imposed banishment ? I drifted into solitude — I did not 
choose it. I did not seek it, but I made no effort to escape. We 
make effort enough for knowledge — why not to obtain the social- 
ities of life, which are far more valuable than knowledge ? Did 
some false pride withhold me ? — or the morbid dread of receiving, 
or soliciting a favour ? Oh ! if I again stood upon the broad 
highway of life, I would stand there a beggar, hat in hand, for 
any smile of friendship ! I would receive an act of sociahty like 
alms. Now it is too late to change. 



We met again in the Villa Eeale. The little girl was a few 
paces in advance. I had evidently attracted her attention. A 
wan complexion, a feeble gait, had, I suppose, excited a vague 
feehng of compassion in her. After scanning me awhile, she 
came forward, and, with the most simple grace imaginable, 
offered me the flower she was holding in her hand. Very fond 
herself of flowers, she thought the gift must be acceptable ; at 



342 BOOK v.— CHAPTER I. 

all events, it was what she had, at the moment, to give, and she 
was longing to make some demonstration of her good-will. I 
took the flower; but instead of thanking her as I should have 
done, I continued looking, with intense interest, at this fair vision 
that had thus come before me. She expected, and very rightly, 
that I should speak. 

Now, when grown-up people open conversation with a child, 
the first question asked is generally, " What is your name ? " 
She had expected this question, and was prepared with her 
answer. The question did not come, but the answer did. After 
a short pause, she said, " My name is Julia Montini Clarence, 
and this," stretching out her hand towards Clarence, " is my 
new papa, who is very good to everybody." 

" My little girl," said Clarence, stepping forward and taking 
the child's hand, " is unconsciously performing one of the most 
solemn rites of society — the introduction of two strangers. You 
will excuse her, for she knows not what she is doing. And yet, 
as you appear to be an Englishman and an invalid, if I — 

At this moment, his eye meeting mine, he recognized me. 

" Thorndale ! " 

" Clarence ! " 

Were exclamations which broke from us at the same moment. 
Grasping my hand, and looking at my altered face, he burst 
into tears like a woman. 



They got into the carriage with me, and accompanied me 
home. Clarence expressed himself delighted with Villa Scarpa. 
Julia flew to the garden, and struck up an ardent friendship with 
my little spaniel. Julia said she knew where I lived ; she had 
found it out. And when I told her that I also, though not in- 
tending it, had been a spy upon her, and knew where she lived, 
and moreover, " that h — o — r — n spelt trumpet," she clapped 
her hands with delight, and blushed, and laughed, and we were 
the best friends in the world. 



A NEW INTRODUCTION TO AN OLD FRIEND. 343 

" And you saw me then, Thorndale, and did not speak ! " said 
Clarence. " Ah, but I understand it all ; and how this solitude, 
like a cruel nurse, nurses very ill, but will let no one else take 
her place. It is only since I came abroad that I heard that you 
also were in Italy. I had sent home for further inquiries ; and 
at this very time there is a letter on its way from England to 
tell me of your address. You could not long have kept me out." 

j^ 

He comes, and brings Julia, and together they make this 
place a little paradise. All the beauty of the scene has revived 
to me. 

Clarence is resolved to try the experiment of painting a pic- 
ture in the open air, with the very scene before him, instead of 
working in his studio from sketches and memory. He declares 
that my little terrace is exactly the place for him. He likes my 
view better than his own ; and begs he may bring his easel here, 
and paint morning after morning, till the picture is finished. Is 
this an amiable pretence to disguise an act of kindness? He 
had already advanced some way in his picture, taken from the 
prospect at his own house. Well, to such natures an act of kind- 
ness is itself a pleasure. 

I will accept your kindness, Clarence; I have learnt to re- 
ceive — to submit to be the grateful one. 



I find that Julia is not the daughter — only the adopted 
daughter — of Clarence. He is still unmarried. The age of 
Julia (she is five years old) ought to have convinced me that she 
could not have been his own daughter, for otherwise he must 
have kept his marriage for a long time a profound secret. But 
I think, to a bachelor's eye, all little girls are of the same age. 
One does not, in fact, begin to count years for them at all, till 
they have ceased to be little girls. 

Clarence has been telling me the story of Julia, or rather of 
her father Montini, and how he came to adopt her for his child. 
It was a touching story ; at least as he told it. I shall try and 
repeat it as nearly as I can in his own words. 



CHAPTER II. 



JULIA MONTINI. 



(CLAEENCE loquitur.) 



Etterby is a village on the borders of the New Forest, in 
Hampshire. On the outskirts of this village there lived an old 
man, something between sculptor and stone-mason ; he wrote up 
" Statuary " (whatever grade in the arts that may signify) in 
white letters on a green semicircular board, which formed a sort 
of archway over his garden-gate. The cottage that he lived in 
stood back from the road, on a small plot of ground of its own ; 
it had formerly been tenanted, together with some additional 
ground, by a market-gardener. One saw plainly enough that it 
had never been originally designed for the studio of an artist, if 
artist this old man is to be called. His occupation was to carve 
tombstones for the neighbouring churchyard — dogs and lions, 
couchant or rampant, for park gates, or still more ambitious figures 
for those whose taste leads them to plant stone statues amongst 
their cabbages. I think the proprietor of a neighbouring tea- 
garden had been his greatest patron. 

The garden or orchard in front of the cottage in which the 
old man generally worked, presented no ordinary spectacle to 
the passer-by. There might be seen sundry Fames and Victo- 
ries, some standing upon tip-toe, ready to drop their wreath upon 
any head, or hold it in any cause, for which their services should 
be enlisted. There was a very grim Diana, on whose privacy, 
even if it had not been protected by a very large quiver full of 
arrows, no one, I am sure, would voluntarily have intruded. 
Old father Time, with his scythe and hour-glass, was there, you 
may be sure ; he sat conspicuous amongst the apple-trees. This 



JULIA MONTINI. 345 

last was an apparition which struck terror into the hearts of the 
little boys of the village, especially in winter- time, when the 
bare trees not only permitted him to be fully seen, hut brought 
him out with very appalling effect. 

The sculptor was at his work one afternoon in this garden, 
upon a tombstone on which he had been summoned to put forth 
all his art. The cherub's face that he was carving on the upper 
part of it, and which was to form its chief ornament, seemed 
very intractable — was very slow to make its appearance. It 
was evident that the old man's hand trembled with age, and (as 
the result of age) with uncertainty and timidity. A wandering 
Italian, a gentleman by birth, an artist by profession, a patriot 
and an exile, was passing at the time. He stopt to look at the 
sculptor. He stood on the pathway, and, looking over the 
wicket-gate, watched with interest the progress of the old man. 
A good-natured smile was playing on his lips. After w^atching 
some time, he moved closer to the gate ; then, after another 
pause, lifted the latch, and opened the gate itself; and finally, 
without a word spoken on either side, he quietly took the chisel 
and the mallet from the old man's hands, and proceeded with a 
task for which the powers of the timid veteran were plainly 
unequal. 

The veteran sculptor would certainly have resented this singu- 
lar intrusion, but there was that in the handling of the tools by 
the stranger which immediately told him that he belonged to the 
craft, and he knew that there w^as very little to spoil in the work 
which had been hitherto accomplished. So he moved aside, and 
gave place to the Italian. Very soon the misshapen features, at 
which the old man had been labouring, began to grow into some- 
thing like form and beauty. 

Absorbed in his task, the Italian worked on till the light 
forsook him. Then, starting up, he noticed wnth surprise how^ 
low the sun had sunk while he had been employed in his fa- 
vourite art, and, laying down the tools, prepared to take his de- 
parture. The old man said nothing, though he secretly wished 
that the day had been longer. But by this time another person 
had joined the group. Annette, the sculptor's daughter, a young, 
fair, simple-hearted girl, had gently stolen to the spot ; had been 
16* 



346 BOOK v.— CHAPTER II. 

looking on, pleased with the progress of the work, not displeased 
with the dark eyes and expressive countenance of the Italian 
himself. Her womanly sympathy detected in that countenance, 
now that the excitement of his voluntary task had passed away, 
the expression of fatigue, exhaustion, and perhaps of despondency. 
She could not suffer him to leave without offering him such un- 
pretending hospitality as the little cottage could bestow. The 
slower mind of the father took up the same proposal, repeated 
the invitation, begged him to accept a supper and a bed, and 
placed the cherub at his disposal for his morning's amusement, 
if he should be inclined to proceed with what he had so well 
commenced. 

The Italian looked at Annette, and then at the half-chiselled 
cherub, and, in the best terms which his imperfect English 
enabled him, accepted their offer. He was wise in doing so. 
The moment he entered the cottage, he felt that fortune had been 
very kind to him, at least for that day. The sweet feminine spirit 
of order and neatness to which the world owes so much, had 
made here also, within four very humble walls, a much more 
pleasant home than the external aspect of the place would 
have promised. With the old man's artistic arrangements, or 
disarrangments — with his tools, and his models and the like — 
Annette never attempted to interfere. He had no order or 
method, or a method quite of his own, and the attempt to teach 
him any other would have only vexed and disturbed him. So 
she let the old sculptor work where and how he pleased, and let 
the old sculpture deposit itself where it would ; and then, between 
the intervals and interspaces, she wrought in her own way so 
wisely and so well, that the old man, though he did not know it, 
lived, the moment he dropt his tools, in the most orderly and 
comfortable manner in the world. Much of luxury in the way 
of provisions there certainly was not, but by some happy inspi- 
ration — for there seemed to be no one to teach her — there was 
not a house in all Etterby (as I myself had opportunities of 
knowing) where flour and water, eggs and milk, apples and 
potatoes, with some modicum of mutton to assist them, per- 
formed such wonders. The flitigued and melancholy exile — 
Montini was his name — felt a sense of repose and tranquillity 



JULIA MONTINI. 347 

steal over him the moment he entered mto the domain of 
Annette. 

Montini's English was as yet very imperfect, but this did not 
prevent conversation — it perhaps promoted sociality ; for Annette 
having now and then to play the part of instructress, was drawn 
from her natural shyness. Playful, and a little coy, and very 
kind, I think this imperfection in his vocabulary rather encour- 
aged her intimacy. And if on some subsequent occasions^'i;here 
was more silence between them than there otherwise would have 
been, even this probably did not make their hearts less tender. 
Silence is not always unpropitious to love. Love, (so says a 
piece of sculpture we are all familiar witli,) when he stoops 
to sharpen his arrow, lays one finger on his lips. 

The morning came, and saw our refugee again busy with his 
cherub ; he had grown fond of his task. Annette's unfeigned 
admiration, as the work proceeded, did not make the task less 
agreeable. Another day passed, and another morning came, and 
he was still reluctant to leave his half-created cherub to the hands 
of another. The old man was equally reluctant to take his place 
in the completion of it. 

You already perceive that he could not leave. A refugee just 
landed in England, (a vessel had put him stealthily on shore at 
the Isle of Wight, and he was making his way towards London,) 
you perceive that he could not quit that garden and that cottage. 
I wish I could bring it before your mind's eye as it must have 
presented itself to the homeless Italian. The apple-trees were 
in blossom, the gooseberry and current bushes fresh and green ; 
there were beds of flowers in one part, of vegetables in another ; 
and somehow it all looked exceeding pleasant, notwithstanding 
that under the trees, and in the grass, and amongst the flowers 
and lettuces, there were lying huge dogs and stone lions, dry 
fountains, or a Muse as dry. Even old father Time, seated 
there so gaunt and feeble you would say his work must be well- 
nigh over — an image of sad augury for the believer in progress 
— failed to produce any very terrible impression. The apple- 
blossoms were falling thick about him. Besides, there moved in 
this garden a nymph — or a fair creature far more serviceable 
and quite as beautiful as any nymph was ever imagined to be — 



348 BOOK v.— CHAPTER II. 

in whose presence the very best of sculpture would have been 
forgotten. The Italian, I knoAv, pauses from his work to gaze 
on the living beauty before him, and thinks no Ideal could equal 
it. Annette, for her part, conscious that an admiring eye is on 
her, hastens towards the artist, and hides her confusion in some 
criticism she has to bestow on that little infant in stone which 
begins to look up very prettily upon them both. 

What had the great city of London, with all its multitude of 
hard stern faces, to offer to the exile that could be compared 
with this ? The old statuary was superannuated ; he wanted a 
successor. Here, if marble was not to be had, there was stone, 
there was clay, and the marble might one day be introduced ; his 
art could still be prosecuted. And here was love ! The angel 
of his life — was it not visible before him in the beautiful Annette ? 
It was impossible he could leave. 

He did not leave. And a few years after, if a stranger loitered 
in the churchyard of Etterby, he could not fail to be struck with 
several figures — here an angel's face, there a cherub's form — 
carved indeed upon a rude stone, but with so much truth, accu- 
racy, and tenderness, as to reveal at once the hand of a master. 
And if the stranger proceeded onwards to the suburbs of the 
village, he might not only discover the artist himself, but the 
living angel and the living cherub that had been his models. 
For Annette was his wife, and Julia was his child. 

I will not believe that his art was lost or thrown away, because 
many a simple person who felt the charm of those monumental 
figures, never dreamt of asking themselves whether there was 
any merit in them as works of art, or dreamt of such a person 
as the artist at all. They felt the charm. Very gladly would I 
be the artist for such unconscious admirers. I was one day lin- 
gering in the churchyard at Etterby, (for the New Forest was at 
that time a favourite resort of mine,) and I found myself first 
standing still, then sitting down, before a cherub's face, beaming 
out upon me quaintly enough between two bits of wings stuck, 
in due traditional manner, on either side of it. There was so 
much life and beauty in the face that I determined to know how 
it came there. On turning round, I noticed a stranger, who also 
seemed to be looking at the same object, and I put the question 



JULIA MONTINI. 349 

to him. It was the artist himself — it was Montini. He had seen 
me stop before his work, and very naturally stopped himself to 
mark its effect upon a stranger. We were friends directly. He 
invited me to enter what he could hardly call, he said, his studio. 
I had been looking, as I learnt afterwards, at the very cherub the 
doing which had won him his Annette. 

I never entered a house where I met with so charming a 
reception ; I never was introduced t<5^ so happy or so beautiful a 
group as I found in this little cottage at Etterby. The old 
statuary had now departed this life. What had been a work- 
shop or lumber-room now fairly deserved the name of an artist's 
studio, for there were beautiful designs and models to be seen 
everywhere about it. Separated from the neighbouring gentry 
by their poverty, and from the villagers by their taste and edu- 
cation, the young couple lived entirely alone. But Montini loved 
his art, and loved Annette, and Annette loved her Italian with 
all her soul ; and there was the little Julia running from knee 
to knee, never knowing which she loved the best. They took 
me into their confidence. Montini told me all the history of his 
exile and of his love. I paid several visits to Etterby, and com- 
missioned the artist to execute for me some small piece of sculp- 
ture, as well for a motive or excuse for riding over to his house 
as for any other reason. 

Amongst other changes which a few years had brought about, 
Montini had learnt to speak our language with perfectr fluency. 
A scholar and a man of refined taste, he made very rapid ad- 
vances. He studied English alternately with Annette and our 
poets, and soon began to expound to Annette herself the beau- 
ties of her own literature. This gentle girl, brought up in a 
most secluded state, and with very little erudition, described to 
me, with great simplicity, the alarm she felt at discovering the 
very superior man she had won to love her ! There is no such 
complete disguise as to be compelled to use a foreign language 
very imperfectly understood. When the Italian came to her 
house, he only spoke a little English. Annette loved him for 
his gentleness, his misfortunes, his beauty. She had never seen 
any thing like him before. It was the story again of Miranda 
and Prince Ferdinand. But as the Italian learnt to read and 



•:5oO BOOK v.— CHAPTER II. 

speak our language, the disguise upon the mind fell off, and re- 
vealed to her the accomplished and highly cultivated man whose 
ardent patriotism had alone driven him into poverty and exile. 
She was sufficiently instructed to appreciate this intellectual 
superiority, and her first sentiment was that of alarm. " He 
will cease to love me — he is too much above me," was her first 
fearful thought. " But he was so good," she said, " and he 
seemed to grow kinder as he grew wiser ; and then," she added 
with charming simplicity, " I began to read myself, as fast as I 
could, every book in the house. But indeed it was needless ; 
he has never loved me the less, and I have only loved him the 
more, since the discovery we made how much he was the wiser 
of the two." 

Annette had no cause to fear that Monti ni could be faithless 
to his love of her. A^hat she might have dreaded was his fidel- 
ity to a still earlier passion — his love of art, his love of fame. 
I trembled for the tranquillity and continuance of the sweet 
home in Etterby, when I heard him talk of preparing some 
work for exhibition at our Royal Academy. I saw him in 
imagination follow the precious and elaborated marble to its final 
deposit in a dark corner of that small and crowded room which 
is devoted by our Academy to works of sculpture. So small 
are its dimensions, that it could not exhibit to advantage more 
than two or three statues; one large group would fill it. I saw 
him in imagination standing there w^atching the spectators as 
they jostle past, catalogue in hand. Each looks for the already 
celebrated name, and only wastes his time on the Flaxman or 
the Foley of his age. Whether Montini would succeed in at- 
tracting any attention, or whether he would find that his work 
was as little exhibited as if it had remained in the village of 
Etterby, in neither case would he return tlie same man to his 
secluded home. 

Meanwhile Annette so little foresaw the threatened danger 
from this quarter, that nothing delighted her so much as the 
idea of the glory of her husband. She partook of all his en- 
thusiasm, and would talk with him by the hour of subjects for 
his chisel. Marble is a terribly expensive material, and he had 
resolved to send the marble statue — the completed, finished work. 



JULIA MONTINI. 351 

But tlie clay was at hand, and the model could be made. What 
happy hours they spent over that clay ! It is indeed in the clay 
that the sculptor hopes and thinks. I almost wished that the 
marble might never make its appearance. How happily they 
wrought together over the more plastic material ? — poets both I — 
constructing one fiction for the future marble, and another for 
their future lives. 

Ought I'lo grieve, or ought I to rejoice, that they were not 
permitted to make trial of that experiment on which their hearts 
were so intent ? Ought I to grieve that this beautiful life at 
Etterby was brought to a sudden and most abrupt close before a 
single joy of it, a single hope, had tarnished ? 

I had been unable to visit Montini for some time. I thought 
it singular that the little work which he had promised me had 
not been executed, and was rather impatient to receive it ; for, 
with our usual inconsistency, while I trembled at any thing 
which might break up his village home, I was bent on showing 
this specimen of his art to those who could appreciate his talent, 
and call it forth from obscurity. I felt an uneasy presentiment ; 
and at the earliest opportunity I rode over to Etterby. Death 
had been there before me. Illness first, and then death. Annette 
had been first attacked — I never could learn precisely with what 
disorder. But it was fatal. Whether the same fever had ex- 
tended to Montini, or whether watching and agony of mind had 
predisposed him for some other form of disease, I cannot say. 
The prevailing report was that he died of cholera. No one ven- 
tured, on this account, to go near the house ; it presented a scene 
of complete desolation. 

I will not dwell on the terrible spectacle which met me as I 
entered that house. The beautiful picture of terrestrial happi- 
ness was obliterated as with a single stroke. There was nothinsf 
now but the darkness of death. At the moment I entered, the 
little Julia was the only living thing there. She rushed into my 
arms, sobbing fearfully. She clung to me as to her only pro- 
tector. We had always been friends. I felt at that moment 
that she was committed to my charge. She was my daughter 
from that instant. There was no one — at least in England — to 
dispute my claim. 



352 BOOK v.— CHAPTER 11. 

I forget. There was a rival who appeared, and disputed my 
claim. The servant of the house had abandoned the place at 
mention of the terrible word Cholera. Nor had any of the 
inhabitants of Etterby as yet ventured to approach the house. 
But there was an old crone, whom the hopes of pillage had led, 
at all risks, to enter it. She had already been making off with 
some articles of value, and had returned — what think you for ? — 
to carry away my Julia. Ay, and she begged hard to have the 
child, protesting that she loved it as a mother. She would have 
strapped it on her back ; she would have dragged it, foot-sore 
and weeping, from town to town, to excite the charity of soft- 
hearted, foolish people. She would have extorted alms from 
them by the misery of this poor child — alms of an idle charity, 
that gives without making one indignant inquiry. Such is the 
charity of the thoughtless ! and to such wickedness will it in- 
cite. This old hag felt herself ill-used, and cursed me bitterly 
because I came — thank Heaven ! — between her and her prize. 

Montini had an uncle in Italy, wealthy and of noble family, 
whom he had doubly offended, first, by choosing the profession 
of an artist ; and secondly, by his political Quixotism, as the 
uncle called it. I had heard Montini say, that though he should 
never solicit any thing for himself, yet perhaps this uncle might, 
at some future time, befriend his child. It seemed an act of jus- 
tice to Julia that I should find out this wealthy relative ; hence my 
present journey into Italy. 

I have succeeded in discovering him. You will ask what suc- 
cess I have met with in urging the claims of Julia? Much 
what I expected. As to Montini's marriage, the nobly-born 
uncle looked on it as such a mesalliance as. not, in fact, to be re- 
garded as a marriage at all. " Was there not a foundling hos- 
pital in London especially established to meet such cases ? " In 
short, the only result has been that I feel, more than ever, that 
Julia is my undisturbed possession — that no one will interfere 
between us; and this security was worth the journey to obtain. 

So died the noble-hearted Montini ! I grieve to think what 
hours of solitary anguish he must have endured : his wife struck 
dead, and he himself prostrated by disease. But if disease itself 
did not paralyze all his faculties, and so bring its own sad remedy 



JULIA MONTINI. 353 

to the afflictions it occasioned, if tliere was a moment when the 
greatest fortitude of soul was demanded, I know not, and have 
never known, the man more capable of responding to that de- 
mand. The cahii heroism of Montini, the combination of great 
patience with great energy, was illustrated throughout his career. 
For myself, I far more frequently dwelt on the beautiful picture 
of happiness which his little cottage displayed for several years, 
than on the sad and sudden obliteration of the whole scene. 



Such was the story of Montini. " You have said nothing," 
I observed to Clarence when he had finished it, " on the part 
which he had played as an Italian patriot." 

" He was engaged," Clarence replied, " in some conspiracy, 
which was detected before the insurrection to which it was to 
lead, took place. He never shrunk from acknowledging the 
part he had taken in that conspiracy, nor in his happy retreat 
at Etterby did he ever forget that patriotic cause which had 
made an exile of him. I believe that at any time he would 
have sacrificed his life, precious as it had become to him, to 
secure the freedom and independence of his beloved Italy. But 
what could the exile do ? To meet with other exiles, and talk 
bitterly and in rage, would avail nothing. Ha^ an opportunity 
for action arrived, he would have been found at his post. 

" One day as I entered his studio," continued Clarence, " I 
noticed a stiletto lying amongst his modelling tools. Montini 
observed that my eye had been arrested by it. ' An unfortunate 
symbol,' he said, smiling, ' to meet you in the house of a refugee 
and a conspirator. But I assure you it has never been used on 
any thing more sensitive than the clay or the plaster — nor was 
ever likely to be. A conspirator I certainly have been — and 
could I be in Italy for three weeks without being arrested, and 
thrown into a prison for life, I should be a conspirator again. I 
would prepare and incite my countrymen to that revolt by which 
alone they can obtain their independence, their true national hfe ; 
and I see not how this is to be done, in a country where every 
expression of opinion is forbidden, but by conspiracy. We have 
to teach by conspiracy, to incite by conspiracy, to arm and fight 



354 BOOK v.— CHAPTER II. 

by conspiracy. It is the dire necessity imposed on us. It is the 
greatest affliction of the tyranny we live under, that we cannot 
move towards liberation but through ways and methods the most 
demoralizing. But it is a libel to say that the Italian patriot 
commends assassination. Why do we all, if the cause is good, 
approve of w^ar and condemn assassination ? For this reason, if 
no other : Assassination is not war enough. Assassination is a 
death without a good result — a death that breeds terror, and 
alarm, and enmity, but decides no public quarrel. 

" ' Would that the Italian patriot coidd altogether renounce his 
part of conspirator ! I like it as little as you Englishmen, and 
know more than you Englishmen do of its pernicious effects. 
But you, in the happy political condition to which you have 
attained, do not reflect enough upon the miserable necessities of 
our position. You recoil from secret societies, from plots and 
insurrections ; you w^ould have nothing but fair and open opposi- 
tion. Very good. But what are all your political contests ? Mere 
debates, mere discussions — trial of eloquence, of wit, or strength 
of lungs — trial who shall talk loudest, or write best ; an excite- 
ment w^hich, to most people, is pleasurable enough, and the 
country looks on amused. But we have to earn the privilege of 
such debate and discussion ; we argue with an opponent who 
strikes us on the mouth, who shuts the speaker or the writer 
within four stone w^alls — buries him there alive. The Italian, at 
this epoch, is necessarily a conspirator. He must talk in whis- 
pers, he must assemble in the night, he must deal his blow in 
the shape of insurrection and revolt. Oh, would it were the con- 
test with us, too, who should speak w^ittiest and wisest ! I have 
no distrust of the genius of Italy. But you trample us under 
foot, and we must turn serpents ; w^e must hiss and sting. This 
is nature's great conservatism. The good god Vishnu, when he 
is trodden near to death by a huge elephant, transforms himself 
into a snake, but only that he may again appear as the divine 
man.' 

" It is thus," continued Clarence, " that Montini would talk of 
the condition of his own country. He was not a violent man. 
He strove to do justice even to the Austrian government. ' I can 
understand,' he would say, ' that an Austrian emperor may be 



JULIA MONTINI. 355 

quite as virtuous as an Italian patriot — may sincerely believe 
that he is doing his duty by retaining his power; all I know is, 
that the two are brought together by Fate in mortal antagonism. 
I am often told that laws would not be better administered, nor 
better laws be made, under an Italian than under this German 
government. Perhaps not. But there are greater questions in 
human life than those which are decided in a court of justice. I 
want the Italian mind to be free ; I want Italian speech to be 
free ; I want the Italian citizen and the Itahan priest to meet 
each other face to face, and honestly to find out what they think 
of each other. That the Austrian uniform is everywhere seen 
in an Italian city, may be galling enough to the national pride. 
But if this had been the whole of the controversy, I, for one, 
would not call upon the red hand of insurrection for aid and 
relief. The whole mind of Italy lies under the double thraldom 
of soldier and of priest. The soldier must stand aside, and let 
me argue with this priest of mine.' " 



Julia is certainly a remarkable child, precocious, and of a most 
susceptible nature. I am not surprised that Clarence begins to 
be anxious about her education, and the influences she may fall 
under. If she enters a church, the music thrills through every 
nerve ; she feels the beauty of pictures, and the scenery here 
affects her as it would older minds. I gave her a book full of 
such prints as generally interest children ; I noticed that it lay 
open upon her lap — that she did not turn the leaves, but kept 
looking at the landscape. 

Her father, by adoption, said to me the other day, " I did not 
think to marry, but I foresee that I must throw this little Julia 
into the lap of some sweet and gentle woman, and throw myself 
at her feet at the same time. Julia will woo for me, and will 
choose for me, better than I could woo or choose for myself." 



I shall be sorry when Julia leaves. To hear her ringing, 
musical voice upon the terrace, to watch her graceful, animated 
gestures, has been a great deliglit. 



356 BOOK v.— CHAPTER II. 

Clarence told me an anecdote the other day, which shows 
what a susceptibility for all impressions lies in this beautiful little 
creature. It was an anecdote of that kind which gives rise to 
many thoughts. 

" I occasionally," he said, " visit the Catholic churches, out of 
the usual motives — the love of art, and the love of music — tliht 
attract most strangers ; and Julia has sometimes accompanied 
me. I remember, on one of these visits, she saw a woman at 
her devotions before a sacred picture, and stood awe-struck, con- 
templating, at a little distance, the kneeling figure. When we 
left the church, she asked me, in a subdued voice, whether that 
was a saint, and whether she was not praying ? I simply re- 
plied that she was praying. 

" You may have noticed," he continued, " a picture hanging 
over the sideboard in my present parlour. It is a copy of one 
of Perughio's Madonnas. The other day my little damsel was 
left alone for some time in the room. She first placed on the 
sideboard two candlesticks, with their wax candles in them, one 
on each side of the picture. She then took some ornamental 
vases that stood on the mantelpiece, filed these with flowers, and 
arranged them before the Madonna. You perceive that she had 
improvised an altar, and with no bad taste. She lit her candles, 
and then, drawing a chair to the sideboard, she knelt upon the 
chair before the Madonna. 

" What my little devotee could be thinking of, what threw her 
into the ecstatic state in which I found her, it would be hard to 
divine ; perhaps it would be hard to divine what ecstatic persons 
of an older age are always thinking of ; however, when I entered 
the room she was kneeling there, looking up with rapt devotion, 
a?id her eyes streaming with tears. She had not noticed my 
entrance, she was so absorbed. 

" I took her gently down from the chair — kissed her — but said 
nothing. She was sobbing hysterically. I calmed her, but 
asked for no explanation. I thought it wise, however, to remove 
the picture into my own room ! " 



JULIA MONTINI. 357 

This daughter of Montini and Annette, and now the adopted 
child of Clarence, who loves her as the apple of his eye — one 
trembles to think how a nature so susceptible and so cultivated 
will encounter the real world. What if her beauty win her the 
admiration — the six months' sincere devotion — of some hand- 
some trifler of our sex, whom she will invest for the time wath 
all the virtues of the truest soul. Oh, what a wreck wdll it 
all be ! 



CHAPTER Iir. 

CLARENCE IS STILL THE UTOPIAN. 

My little terrace now exhibits a very picturesque group. My 
sofa is wheeled out under the acacia-tree ; Clarence stands near 
me, at his easel, painting ; Julia, under shelter of her straw-hat, 
is busy gardening. Her greatest of all delights is to water the 
flowers ; she is then both doing and giving something. Yet she 
has, I think, one pleasure still greater. It is when she can be 
of any service to the invahd — can bring a cushion or place a 
footstool. If Bernard lets her bring to me some drink that he 
has been decocting, she trembles with joy. From such little 
creatures we learn much ; we learn what is ebullient and spon- 
taneous in our human nature. 

Clarence still "talks Utopia;" and occasionally, under the 
excitement of his subject, he forgets his picture and the land- 
scape — steps out from behind his easel, and with his guiding- 
stick in his hand by way of wand, unveils to me the programme 
of the Future. If Clarence likes to talk, I like to listen ; I 
agree or disagree; put in a few words, generally, I regret to 
say, of doubt and dissent ; but I am for the most part content 
to listen. 

" How happily the days, 
Of Thalaba pass by ! " 

Once or twice the shadow of the Cistercian monk has been seen 
gliding in upon the terrace. I say the shadow, because from the 
position in which I lay, I saw the shadow of the monk before he 
himself made his appearance. When he heard voices in the 
hitherto so silent retreat of Villa Scarpa, he paused at the angle 
of the house, doubtful whether to advance or not. I saw the 
shadow, but said nothing, not wishing to constrain him. 



CLARENCE IS STILL THE UTOPIAN. 359 

Once he advanced and renewed his acquaintance with Clar- 
rence. The second time he came, the voice of Julia was ring- 
ing out with laughter. From where he stood he could see the 
child. The shadow paused longer than before. It advanced 
and then receded ; again came forward a little, and then finally 
withdrew. The monk had stolen back again to his convent. I 
have not seen him since. 



" How ca7i any man think so ! " is an exclamation I have 
ceased to make. Men brought up at the same university, read- 
ing the same books, trained by the same studies, come to conclu- 
sions diametrically opposite. Cyril and Clarence are both men 
of perfect sanity of mind, both were esteemed by their friends 
as men of remarkable ability, and what a complete contrast do 
they present ! To Cyril it is the Past that has given us finally 
whatever of truth is worth the possessing ; he has no Future 
except that of Heaven ; or if he has any terrestrial Utopia, it 
must consist in the universal submission to the one Catholic 
Church ; surely a dream of unanimity as wild as any that mortal 
imagination has entertained. To Clarence there is a terrestrial 
Future^ continually brightening, so that it will approximate to 
what we conceive of Heaven ; and in that future the pure truths 
of religion will unfold themselves more and more, and will sep- 
arate themselves more and more from the additions made to 
them by the imaginations and passions of men. 

Clarence still holds to his favourite idea, that out of the pres- 
ent type of society there will be gradually evolved another and 
a better type. It is here I must dissent from him. Men, in 
some vague way, are to labour in partnership to sustain the 
general prosperity of some guild or body to which they belong. 
Thus idleness and want will be both driven from the world. To 
me it seems — I regret to think so — that the numerous and severe 
labours of society can be carried on only by individuals striving 
for their own individual good — their very self-preservation. 
Without such prompt and urgent motives, no digging in mines 
or weaving of cloth. It is the battle for life, and for preser- 
vation of wife and child, that drives on the great Avheels on 
which all movement depends. 



360 BOOK v.— CHAPTER HI. 

I cannot look upon the world, and believe with Cyril that the 
time is coming when all men will unanimously embrace the faith 
of the one apostolic Church. I cannot look upon the world, and 
believe with Clarence that the time will come when the spirit of 
equitable partnership, and the desire of the good of all, will so 
remodel the industry of the world, and so check and restrain the 
passions of the world, that want, and all the crime that springs 
from want, will be driven from the earth. Yet to Cyril and to 
Clarence these respective faiths seem the most rational of doc- 
trines. 

But although Clarence still "talks Utopia," I think I notice, 
in more than one respect, some modification of his views. I 
trace the influence of Seckendorf. I trace this more especially 
in the desire that he manifests to harmonize what I may rudely 
call the truths of physiology with the truths of metaphysics. He 
has added to his title of Utopian that of Eclectic. 



Clarence saw this book, this Diary of mine, lying upon the 
table, and frankly asked, What I had been writing ? I as 
frankly told him, and described the sort of amusement I had 
created for myself, by reviving the impression of some of my 
♦ friends — himself amongst the number. I added, that the labour 
of penmanship, or rather the position of the body that it re- 
quired was becoming daily more fatiguing, and that the Diary 
must be given up, otherwise I should be probably gleaning from 
his present conversations some summary of his own philosophy ; 
for hitherto, I said, I had done more justice to his opponent, 
Seckendorf, than to himself. 

" Oh, I will write my own Summary ! " he exclaimed. " Let 
me read the book, and let me fill up the rest of the blank pages 
with the scheme of thought of ' an Eclectic and Utopian Philoso- 
pher!'" 

I smiled at the idea. What was the use, I said, of writing out 
his thoughts in a manuscript which was now ripe for the flames ? 

" Not so ! not so ! " he said. " It shall not be burnt. I will 
write my Confessio Fidei; it is always good exercise to overlook 



CLARENCE IS STILL THE UTOPIAN. 361 

one's own ideas ; and then we will hide the book in some loft or 
cranny of this villa. Years hence, some one will discover it, and, 
smile as he learns how people felt and reasoned A7ino Domini 
1850." 

I still dissented. 

" It will amuse us both," he continued, " if nothing else. 
There are no secrets?" 

" No ! " I said ; " that is not my reason. There are some 
personal con^sions, but nothing, I suspect, that will be new 
to you. With you, Clarence, and at this eleventh hour, reserve 
drops off. But it will be a mere waste of your time." 

" I think not," he replied. " What delightful paper it is ! 
How tempting to the pen ! And there are just blank sheets 
enough." 

I still stood out. But if he urges his project again, he shall 
have his whim. 

What he calls his Confessio Fidei is to contain his views — 
1. Of the Development of the Individual Mind; and, 2. Of the 
Development of Society. He must write a marvellously small 
hand if he gets the barest outline of his philosophy into the 
residue of this manuscript volume. 



I have consented. Clarence is to read these imperfect utter- 
ances of mine. I shall owe to him in return what statement he 
can contrive to make, in this compass, of his own philosophical 
views; and posterity — or the rats — are to have the benefit of 
both. 

I trust in the rats. Or if some Italian plasterer finds our 
united labour, he will not be a more formidable critic. 



END OF THORNDALE S DIARY. 



16 



THE CONFESSION OF FAITH 



OP AN 



ECLECTIC AND UTOPIAN PHILOSOPHER, 



A.D. 1850. 



INTRODUCTION. 



THIS CREATION OF NATURE AND MAN A PROGRESSIVE 
MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 

I HAA^E been so often told that I am a mere Utopian, that I 
have ended at length by frankly accepting the title. And in- 
deed I know of no other which denotes great hopes of the future 
development of our teiTestrial humanity, which is not associated 
with tenets I should be solicitous to repudiate. The current name 
of Socialist, which, so far as it denotes a higher development of 
our social nature, would be acceptable enough, is far too inti- 
mately connected with that of Democrat to please me ; and it is 
thought, moreover, (whether justly or unjustly,) to be blurred 
and blotted with the foul taint of sensuality and libertinism. To 
me the Family is the most sacred of all unions. To me chastity, 
or the due government of our passions, one of the most indis- 
pensable of duties. He who will not submit to self-restraint, 
who boasts to me of his free and ardent nature, may burn him- 
self down to the socket if he pleases ; but what has he to do 
with questions of the well-being of society, or what has society 
to do with him but to keep him at arm's length, and see that he 
burns and smoulders out with the least danger and annoyance 
to others? Self-government — the preponderance of the higher 
parts of our nature over the lower — is the only means of attain- 
ing, or rather it is synonymous with, the higher type of society. 
I can understand no social change to be an improvement which 
tends to weaken the marriage union. He who presents to me 
schemes of progress which, in domestic life, dissever the bond of 
marriage, and, in public life, place the ignorant, the selfish, and 



366 INTRODUCTION. 

the superstitious in the seat of authority, is not the man I desire 
to be enrolled with. Under no common banner will I enlist with 
him. 

I cannot play the demagogue; I cannot flatter the multi- 
tude ; I cannot tell them they are simply the ill-used, the ill- 
governed. As a general rule, they are as well governed as 
their own nature permits them to be. I have always striven, 
wherever the opportunity occurred, to dissipate the illusion which 
hangs over the minds of so many, that there is some vague 
power called society which could do wonders for them if it 
pleased. " Society should do this, society should do that." 
They themselves are the society, or the greater part of it. Do 
you want new modes of acting or of living together ? Such 
new modes can only result from new ideas, and a new spirit 
of action which must be participated by all. This man, who 
demands all possible virtues from society, does he bring his own 
share of these virtues to society ? Does he bring that spirit of 
justice, that love of the public good, which he desires to find in 
society when acting for him in its corporate capacity ? Does he 
bring a genuine desire for the good of all, or is he anxious only 
for his own good? Has he risen to the conviction that his own 
welfare is bound up with the well-being of the whole. And is 
that well-being of the whole, itself a distinct and dominant de- 
sire of his mind — a great idea, which has so become a part of 
himself that he feels his life would be impoverished, mean and 
spiritless, if you took it from him ? Unless he can answer these 
questions in the affirmative, what right has he to expect a truly 
patriotic and enlightened government ? Happily for the multi- 
tude, great and heroic minds have, from time to time, been able 
to enforce upon them — perhaps through the instrumentality of 
their own superstitions — a better government and better rules 
of conduct than they would voluntarily have instituted — rules 
of conduct which, how6ver, they have afterwards voluntarily 
adopted, thus growing into self-government. Happily for the 
multitude, there have been appointed by Providence the great 
disciplines of war, and the monarchy, and the potent priesthood 
— all that the Camp, the Palace, and the Temple may stand 
symbol for — training them forward to intelligent and pre- 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 367 

meditated combinations for all the great purposes of society. 
Yes ! I have a most sanguine, most Utopian faith in the future 
of mankind, but I have no faith in existing human ignorance. 
For men whom want has made selfish, obtuse, narrow-minded,^ 
I have unfeigned compassion ; to them I would bring whatever 
aid were possible, be it in the shape of the larger loaf, or the 
larger comprehension ; in them I will put no trust. I will be a 
Democrat when virtue and intelligence are qualities of the 
multitude, as I verily believe they will one day become. 

For me, I trust to the slow progress of knowledge, and to mul- 
tiplied efforts, in this and that individual, to think and live well 
for the commonwealth. I cannot tell men that, without any effort 
on their part, they will come to live happier and nobler lives. 
Sometimes a statement diametrically opposite to the one you 
desire to make, aids you greatly in expressing your own. M. 
Fourier, if I have been able to understand his system, teaches us 
that the most perfect social order would be educed from the play 
of our passions, if we would but let them have their natural scope. 
He boasts to have made the grand discovery that our varied pas- 
sions, if left to themselves, would so counteract, so supplement 
each other, that the most complete harmony would result. If so, 
how happens it that society did not at once arrange itself into 
this perfect harmony by thcspontaneous passions of men ? Spon- 
taneity comes before Reflection. How is it that human society 
was not at once complete, like the society of bees and of ants ? I 
hold to the old guides. Reason and Conscience. It is because 
these have to be cultivated, or to be slowly created and perfected 
in us, that the progress of society is so slow. And indeed man 
would be no better than an ant or a bee, if he had not ultimately 
to shape the human society, by dint of thinking it out, and striv- 
ing for it. 

It is the slow education of the reason and the conscience of the 
human race I contemplate and believe in. I am no revolutionist. 
I am not looking for the day or the year when a legislative power 
shall suddenly change the laws of property under which we live. 
The Communist is supposed to be agitating in the present era 
for some such organic change. No venerable patrician, purvey- 
ing his broad acres, could hear of such an agitation with greater 



368 INTRODUCTION. 

repugnance and alarm than the poor wandering artist who is now 
writing his Gonfessio Fidei. Nevertheless, that great organic 
changes will take place, as they have hitherto taken place, grad- 
ually, almost imperceptibly, is what I cannot but believe. I think 
*I can trace movements going on amongst us, which will be found 
one day to be parts of this progressive change. I am patient. I 
do not measure out our progress by the rapid march of one man's 
wishes or brilliant anticipations, but by the slow, voluminous, and 
complicated processes of nature. In nature, a thousand causes 
are often at work for one effect. Nor is there any plant upon 
the earth whose growth is so complicate and so slow as this last 
and noblest, — the mind of man. Century after century it puts 
forth higher branches and bears nobler fruit. That it will con- 
tinue to grow is the only revolution I prophesy ; that this and that 
branch will still carry out its buds farther next year than it did 
the last, is what the nature of the plant and its past history jus- 
tify me in predicting. Only I must add this, (lest our metaphor 
should embarrass us,) — that society is a far more complicate 
organization than the tree, and growth in one part influences and 
may modify the whole organism. 

I therefore accept my title of Utopian, since it calls up no idea 
of democratic violence, nor of plans hostile to the Family, nor, 
finally, of a spirit inimical to religion.. For, in my view, it would 
be quite as impossible for man to outgrow religion, as to outgrow 
morality. To the end of time our conscience, in its last and high- 
est form, will be the voice of God, — his will as expressed in the 
reason he has created in us. I do not found morality upon 
religion in that absolute manner in which some appear to do. 
They are coevals, giving mutual and interchangeable support. 
When men, in the interest of religion, assert that there could be 
no morality at all without religion, they contradict some of the 
simplest and most palpable facts of human experience. Man 
depends on man, and must have a morality of some kind. Man 
depends on nature, whioli he soon interprets to be a dependence 
upon God, and must have a religion of some kind. How these two 
mutually aid, support, and elevate each other, I shall have occa- 
sion to show. It is my belief that no high morality could have 
grown up, in the first instance, without the aid of religion ; on 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 369 

the other hand, religion is but a grand egotism, a selfish fear, or 
selfish hope, till it is linked with the love of man, or the genuine 
desire to promote the good of others. We live more and more, 
as we advance, under the felt government of God ; but then we 
understand that government better as we advance. Obedience 
to the will of God, and sincere desire for the good of the whole, 
become intimately and inseparably blended together in the con- 
science. 

My Utopia thus resolves itself into a sanguine belief in the 
progress of mankind, — progress in arts, science, morals, religion. 

Let me in this Introduction say a word or two on the great 
idea of Progress, and also on the still higher topic of the idea of 
God. You must excuse me, Thorndale, if, here and elsewhere 
throughout this essay, I sometimes repeat to you your own ideas. 
There is no help for this. We have often discussed these topics 
together. I have often learnt from you, especially where the 
conversation led into abstruse or metaphysical inquiries. I must 
sometimes give you back your own. Perhaps you will not re- 
ceive it with such addition and application as I may have made. 

Idea of Progress. 
The great idea of Progress — namely, that our world is a pro- 
gressive creation — that both nature and man have passed through 
different stages, and will probably pass through others — is the 
peculiar distinction or characteristic of modern philosophy. It 
is an idea which could not belong to the human race till a certain 
advancement had been made, both in its own history and in the 
knowledge acquired of the surrounding world. Humanity must 
have made some progress before it could look back upon a less 
perfect past, and forward to a more mature futurity. Nature must 
have been scientifically observed before the conclusion could have 
been arrived at, that creation is progressive — that we live in a 
world not so much made as constantly making — where there is not 
only an incessant Becoming and Disappearing of certain forms, 
animate and inanimate, but where these forms themselves change, 
and the great whole, through new manifestations of the creative 
power, is advancing to its destined perfection. The whole world 
has developed itself into its present state through certain grada- 

16* 



370 INTRODUCTION. 

tions, each change, so far as we can trace the matter, being a pre- 
paration for some subsequent change. Whether the crust of the 
earth is modified by the volcano, or by the slow-deposit of minute 
shells of animals, science detects in the change a necessary con- 
dition for the development of higher forms of life. In humanity, 
or the human consciousness, progressive psychical creation is 
manifested perhaps still more distinctly. Man is led on from 
knowledge to knowledge, from power to power, from thought to 
thought ; and here also it is discoverable that every great stage 
through which he passes is also a preliminary to the subsequent 
stage into which he rises. 

This law of progress, I repeat, is the fundamental idea which 
distinguishes the philosophy of our own era from all previous 
modes of speculation. I do not say that no trace of such an 
idea is to be found in classical or mediaeval times : no great 
idea of this kind comes suddenly into existence ; but it certainly 
occupies no prominent position in any ancient system of philos- 
ophy, whether Greek, or Oriental, or belonging to the latter 
stages of the Roman Empire. A great cycle of events, a cer- 
tain circular movement of all created things ending where it 
began, was the favourite hypothesis of Indian philosophy, and 
of those Europeans who cared to carry their speculations over 
vast eras of time. Our mediaeval thinkers were generally dis- 
posed to look upon this world as a system of things to be soon 
and abruptly terminated ; as a system, in fact, rotten at the core, 
and which never could arrive to any enviable maturity. A 
generous impatience at the moral evil around them had led the 
great prophets and teachers of Judea to foretell the speedy 
destruction of the world. A noble rage destroyed what it could 
not reform. Earnest thinkers, who felt that there was a better 
destined for mankind, and saw no way to it on any line men 
were then travelling, hurried up the scene, closed the drama at 
once, and introduced a new order of things — a kingdom where 
a righteous God should reign in the hearts of all men. It was 
a noble ardour, a bold imagination, which has marvellously aided 
that slow progression to the same goal which stands now revealed 
to us as the scheme of Providence. 

Our present conviction of a law of indefinite progress we owe 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 371 

partly to the quite modern revelations of Geology, unfolding to 
us the gradual development that our planet has undergone, both 
in its inorganic and organic forms. We owe it, in part, to the 
rapid progress lately made in various sciences or arts which 
augment the power of man ; and we owe it partly to that very 
position we occupy in the long life of the human race, by reason 
of which we are better able than our predecessors to understand 
the significance of the past history of mankind. For, though it 
seems paradoxical, it is strictly true that the past reveals itself 
to us the more distinctly the farther we recede from it, or the 
higher we rise above it. Human life illustrates human life, and 
the new explains the old. But the fresh -power which man has 
lately felt to have been put into his hands by the fresh knowl- 
edge vouchsafed to him, has perhaps more than any other cause 
emboldened him in his hopes and prospects of the future society. 
What might not men do, what might not men &e, if once the 
great idea of the good of the whole could direct, govern, animate 
all these various powers they have acquired ? 

We are not in a condition to assert that the progressive move- 
ment in the rest of creation, inorganic or organic, has come to a 
stop ; that no new animal will ever be created ; or that the earth, 
air and water, are undergoing no changes which may be pre- 
paratory to new developments of animal life, or which may 
render this planet still more propitious to the development of 
human life. We are surrounded by an inorganic nature which 
is itself capable of modification from the organisms, vegetable 
and animal, which it supports. We may suspect a harmoniously 
progressive movement in the physical world ; we certainly can- 
not specifically predict any such movement. It is with the 
psychical progress of humanity we are especially concerned. It 
is there alone we venture to predict any thing of the future. 

But, it may be said, this psychical progress is but one depart- 
ment, one portion of that progressive creation manifested in the 
whole world. You may speak of the new developments of 
thought, or new states of unconsciousness, as the result of 
mental powers given to man ; or you may describe the mind 
itself of man as nothing else, in fact, than these developments, 
these states of consciousness, IWiich at each stage are produced 



372 INTRODUCTION. 

directly by the power of God. Either way, our new ideas are 
no other than new creations. And, now, who can predict the 
creations of God ? I answer, that if experience has taught me 
that it is the nature of any given species (say of plants) to push 
out new growths from time to time, as well as to repeat the old 
growths, I am as much justified in predicting that there will be 
such new growths as that there will be a repetition of the old. 
I can predict the advancement of human knowledge, because 
experience proves to me that it is the nature of the human mind 
to advance from knowledge to knowledge. I can also, and 
perhaps still more safely, predict the extension of the knowledge 
already attained by the few, to the many, because I see the 
means in operation for such extension ; and I can, above all, 
form some estimate, from past experience, of the effect which 
will be produced on the whole organism of society by this exten- 
sion of the knowledge and habits of thinking of the few to the 
many. These are very modest claims to prophecy — very limited 
powers of prediction ; but it will be found that they are sufficient 
to justify some confident anticipations of the future of human 
society. 

And when, moreover, we rise to the conception that Past, 
Present, and Future form together one development of the 
Divine mind — of whose works, imperfect as our knowledge is, 
we yet know enough to assert that a sublime Benevolence per- 
vades the whole — then our very belief in God becomes a new 
ground of hope for the future. A sublime beneficence is mani- 
fest in this complicated creation of nature and of man ; — we can 
perceive this, although we cannot follow out the details of that 
beneficence in all instances ; and we are bound, in strictest 
reasoning, to conclude that the full development of that crea- 
tion will have for its result the augmented wisdom and happi- 
ness of man. It is no oratorical expression, but a quite logical 
statement, that Faith in God gives us confidence in the future 
greatness of man. 

I shall be thought perhaps to be violating the approved 
method of proceeding from the simple to the complex, by touch- 
ing thus early on the problem of the existence of God. But the 
best order of Exposition is not al#llys the order of actual Devel- 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 373 

opment. The idea of God, such as we now conceive it, is cer- 
tainly not one of the first in order of attainment, but, when 
attained, it is found to be of that fundamental character that 
scarce a step can be taken without some appeal to it. AVhat 
we call development is but another term for creation. All 
reality, all existence whatever, is finally known to us as no other 
than the manifestation in space and time of a Divine Idea. This 
is the " last word " of all our sciences. Power or Force, in 
their last significance, are but names for this manifestation of 
so77ie whole — some Idea. For you can form no conception of 
any power or force per se. Nothing of any kind, in all the 
world about us, exists of itself, or by itself. It only exists as 
part of some whole. A ivhole is always as necessary to the 
existence of the parts^ as the parts to the existence of the whole; 
so that whole and parts can finally be represented to us only as 
the manifestation of a supramundane idea. A conception of this 
fundamental character one may be excused for at once attempt- 
ing to explain or to justify. 

The Argument for the Existence of God. 

I have 'no other to dwell upon than the great universally 
received argument — from design, as it is called. I have only 
to make such a statement of this as will remove it from certain 
objections not unfrequently put forth both in conversation and in 
books. It is an argument which comes in with the earliest 
stages of scientific observation, and which grows and strengthens 
(so it seems*to me) with every accession of knowledge. 

It may seem, as I have already intimated, a somewhat irregu- 
lar proceeding to commence a review of our psychical develop- 
ment with the argument for the existence of God. But I shall 
have other opportunities of returning to the subject where it 
may be more strictly in its place. Meanwhile this relationship 
of Creature and Creator is the key-note- of all my philosophy. 
I have nothing distinct to teach — I have nothing great to hope 
— I can represent nothing intelligibly to myself, unless the 
reality of this relationship is accorded to me. Not only is this 
relationship of Creator and Creature the perennial source of 
such religious sentiments as are destined eternally to exist in the 



874 INTKODUCTION. 

human race ; but every intelligible conception I can form of the 
material world around me, or of my own conscious being — what 
matter is, wliat mind is — all my philosophy, as well as all my 
religion, is bound up in this relationship — in this belief of an 
Intelligential Power through whom all is, and has been, and will 
be. This is a truth which makes its appearance in the earliest 
records of human thought, but which to this very moment has 
not yet taken its rightful and supreme position in the human 
mind. The recognition of it, in its grand simplicity, would be 
alone sufficient to expel many errors that still linger amongst us, 
and to purify and unite the creeds of all nations. 

" I believe," Seckendorf would sometimes say — " I believe 
in God, till your philosophers bring me a demonstration of his 
existence." 

"And then?" I said. 

" And then — I do not believe in the demonstration." 

I certainly have no new demonstration to offer to such men 
as Seckendorf; I even share their distrust in certain a priori 
arguments, as they are called, which revolve upon the necessity 
of a First Cause, of a Perfect Being, of the Absolute, &c. But 
I think I could state the great popular argument — (Nature the 
manifestation of a Divine Thought) — in such a way as to secure 
it from the objections which such men are in the habit of urging 
against it. 

If, on examination, we find that all nature can be intellectu- 
ally apprehended only as the manifestation of a prior Thought, 
what other demonstration can we want, or can we nave, of the 
existence of that Thought ? Other arguments are needless ; and 
where they are not fallacious, they resolve themselves into this. 

Take that favourite abstract proposition — "^w absolute first 
cause is necessary." The word Cause, when applied to the 
phenomena of nature, is a relative term. If no effect can exist 
without its cause, it is equally true that no cause can exist 
without its effect. To speak, in this sense, of an absolute first 
cause, is meaningless. As well speak of one side of an angle 
existing apart ; it is not the side of an angle till the other side 
exists also. Nothing in nature is a cause, unless there is also 
an effect. Then, if you congregate the whole phenomena of 



C TION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 375 

nature ogether, and say you want a cause, out of nature, for 
this whole, you are, in fact, demanding a cause for that unity or 
/'harmony which constitutes the world, or any part of the world, 
to be a whole. You demand this specific cause of a Divine 
Intelhgence, and are reverting to the great popular argument 
(as it is not very fortunately called) from Design. 

We gain nothing by putting such words as Being and Poioer 
on the rack, and trying to extort a truth out of them. We can 
form no conception of Being, unless of some specific being or 
thing; nor of Power, unless it is of some specific movement or 
change. When we speak, in the scholastic sense, of Absolute 
Being, Absolute Power, we are merely falling into the old illu- 
sion of converting a general term into an entity. 

But have we then nothing before us but individual phenom- 
ena ? No ; we have nothing else. But examine well those 
individual phenomena, and you will find that each one exists 
only as a part of some whole ; you will find that the whole is as 
necessary to the parts, as the parts to the whole ; and "it is this 
unity that brings us to the great truth, that a Divine Idea lies 
at the origin of all things. 

" But is it the province," Seckendorf would say, " of mind 
to generate this unity or harmony ? Must not the ordered and 
harmonious creation already exist as a condition for tlie mani- 
festation of thought ? Granting that you can ask for a cause 
for this unity — for this harmonious interdependence, apparently 
necessary to every known existence — you cannot, therefore, 
assign Intelligence as that cause. Moreover, a human intelli- 
gence is itself made up of many parts, of many susceptibilities, 
many sensations, many perceptions, many memories ; you have 
the same unity to account for here as in any of the physical 
phenomena of nature. And you have no other type for the 
Divine Intelligence than the human." 

I answer that it is true I have no other type for the Divine 
Mind than the human ; but the question is, how far is it neces- 
sary to carry the analogy between the two ? I know, from my 
own consciousness, what I mean by the embracing of a whole in 
thought, and the acting according to that thought. But if I use 
this analogy (as I am compelled to do) to explain the world, or 



376 INTRODUCTION. 

render it intelligible to myself, I am at once in poss. \q^ o^ '< 
truth — or have at once advanced to a proposition — whiv^h to-bils 
all further use of the analogy. I cannot ask myself howa 
Creative Thought was ever generated. Some point of similaril 
between the human and the divine mind there must be, or 
could not speak at all of creative mind; but having once arrive 
at this thought of a creative mind, the conclusion immediate 
follows, that, if there is a point of similarity between it and th 
human mind, there is also an essential difference. From nature 
and from man together, I have learnt a third great truth, which 
is sui generis. The point where the divine and human meet ij 
simply this — that I am raised through gradual steps of develop- 
ment to the perception of the world as a whole, and as a whole 
dependent upon a prior Thought. The idea of the whole is 
created or generated in me. But if I am compelled to think it 
as existing in another Being prior to the world, I am compelled 
also to think it as there uncreated, ungenerated, having no im- 
aginable origin. I can only pronounce it to be there eternal, or 
at least without conceivable origin. 

To my mind this great argument assumes the shape of a 
scientific truth, or of a conclusion to which every department of 
science contributes. For the very nature of things discloses to 
us that all known existences are inteUigible only as the expres- 
sion or manifestation of an idea. There is no such thing as a 
simple existence in nature, nor is such a thing conceivable by 
us. A relation between parts is necessary to the simplest object 
we know. Every thing must be conceived as a certain whole 
consisting of parts, and every one of these wholes is defined by 
its relation to other wholes, or to some greater whole of which it 
forms a part ; and we rise at length to the conclusion that the all 
is one whole. Whatever we call the powers or properties of 
any thing, are but its relations to some other thing. The heat 
of one body is its effect upon another body. Resistance is the 
relation of one body to another which it repels. Extension, 
which is the simplest form of existence, is a relation in space 
between different parts, or forces. The smallest atom is still a 
whole, consisting of parts which have the relation of position. 
This relation of position is essential to extension, and therefore 
no extended thing can be a simple body, or simple force. 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 377 

In every distinct specific object in nature — whether a grain of 
sand, an atom of oxygen, an organic cell, or a living animal — we 
recognize a certain whole ; and moreover, in every such case, the 
whole is as necessary to the parts as the parts to the whole ; or, 
in other words, the parts are necessary to each other. What 
determines this whole ? What is its nature ? You cannot say 
that it is determined by the parts, or the separate forces ; for 
these cease to be any thing at all, when they cease to be expres- 
sions of the whole. And if they existed as separate forces, 
which is a mere imagination, they could not determine each 
other's mutual relations. The whole must necessarily be con- 
ceived by us as a manifested idea ; and the forces of nature are 
nothing else than the power of manifestation. The Idea, and 
the Power of manifesting it, form our conception of God. 

Whether we speak of forces or the atom, the simplest element 
in nature is still a compound. An atom could not occupy space, 
and so be an atom, but on condition of its having parts, and 
these parts the relation of position. A force of resistance could 
not be this force without the relation of some other body or force 
which it resists. We speak of elementary forces, and of these 
being transmuted the one into the other, but there is no such 
thing in nature as an elementary force. There are innumerable 
motions, but not one of them stands alone. Forces w^ill be found 
inseparable from the Idea they manifest. 

We cannot begin (as is generally done) by planting, in imagi- 
nation, things or matter, or forces in space, and then describing 
the relations imposed upon them. The relations are of the 
essence of the thing, or the force. Whatever we call a thing or 
a force is such only by reason of those relations. The Idea lies 
at the root of all nature, of all reality. 

If I here pass a criticism upon our popular treatises of Natu- 
ral Theology, our Bridgewater Treatises, and the like, it is in no 
hostile or captious spirit. I know the difficulty of writing on 
these subjects in a quite unobjectionable manner. I would not 
undertake to indite a single page that should not be open to 
criticism. But the frequent use of the term design in such 
treatises, as expressive of a mode of thinking — of thinking out a 
plan — provokes the objection, that design, or adaptation, in this 



378 INTRODUCTION. 

sense, belongs to the imperfect and world-instructed creature, 
man. And, accordingly, one often hears it objected that design 
or contrivance implies memory, and a previously existing world 
of nature, and therefore is inapplicable to God. The term de- 
sign should be limited to the acting on a plan, not incautiously 
extended to the peculiar operation of thought by which a plan is 
constructed. We start from the great idea of the whole ; we 
are altogether in error if we use language that implies a knowl- 
edge of the manner in which the great idea was thought out, or 
came into existence. 

Again, it is very common to find in the human will the type 
of Divine Power. I must protest against this. The will of 
man can be no type of the power of God. Neither do we, for 
the sake of the argument, require a type or resemblance of 
Divine power. If the world is the manifestation of the Divine 
Idea, Power is no other than this very manifestation. It can 
have no analogy in any created thing or person. It is the foun- 
dation of all known existence. 

The argument stands forth with peculiar distinctness when we 
view our world as a progressive creation. Take your stand at 
what era you will, there is a past, a present, a future, that form 
one whole, ^developing itself in time. Now my human expe- 
rience teaches me this : that it is in mind, in consciousness, that 
such a whole can alone exist — a whole which embraces what has 
been, what is, and what is yet to he. "When we speculate on the 
future — when we say that as the Past prepared the Present, so 
the Present is preparing a modified' Future — we tacitly imply 
that there is a Divine Idea embracing past, present, and future 
in one whole. For how can that which is be related to that 
which is not, in any other way than this : that while both exist 
in the Divine Thought, only one is yet manifested in the pro- 
gressive evolution of events ? 

Our old friend and antagonist, Seckendorf, would probably 
return to the charge. Too cautious to advance* any hypothesis, 
or make any positive assertion of his own, he merely stands 
beating off whatever arguments you throw at him. From him 
you would hear no idle talk about Chance, or Necessity, or Law. 
Laws of nature, he would say, are but the generalizations of 



CREATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 379 

known facts. But he would maintain that such generalizations 
are all that we can attain to. Tlie problem of Creation he would 
pronounce to be one utterly beyond the scope of human faculties. 
" We know nothing, and can know nothing," I have heard him 
say, " about creation. The very word is a mere coinage, result- 
ing from a fanciful analogy drawn from the human artificer. 
We know that these wonderful relations and harmonies on which 
theologians dwell, exist, but we know nothing of a cause of them. 
You give me as a cause an Idea, a Thought, a conscious Intelli- 
gence. Now we know nothing of the origin of worlds, but we 
do know something of the origin of Thought; we know that 
there are certain indispensable conditions which precede its 
development; we know it as the consequent, and not the ante- 
cedent, of an established order of events. If I had lived in 
olden times, and the professor of philosophy of that day had 
told me that the earth was supported by an elephant, I think I 
should have replied : I am quite ignorant about the manner in 
which a world supports itself, or whether it has any support at 
all ; but I do know something about elephants — I know that 
elephants walk upon the earth, and are supported by it. 
- Now this objection that things must precede thought, I boldly 
meet by asserting that things are themselves essentially thoughts. 
Relation is of the very essence of every known existence — the 
relation of parts to a whole — and in this relation the whole is 
simultaneous with the parts. How can we possibly conceive 
this whole springing forth except from an idea ? It is not only 
that the facts or phenomena of the world are harmoniously 
arranged, but no phenomenon, no fact, no force exists as such, 
but on condition of this harmony. It is a mistake to speak of 
elementary forces that can be imagined as having a separate 
existence. The simplest — that of Resistance or Space Occu- 
pancy — cannot be manifested without motion ; nor motion with- 
out resistance, or the space occupant. The electric spark seems 
a most simple phenomenon or force, but it requires both of these 
for its manifestation. There is always a relation which cannot 
be said to be the property of the terms or forces, because these 
forces themselves (take away the relation) altogether disappear. 
In the organic world the necessity of the whole to the parts is 



380 INTRODUCTION. 

Strikingly conspicuous. In the simplest cell the pellicle that 
forms the wall of the cell is necessary to the action of the con- 
tents, and the contents are necessary to the formation of the 
pellicle. There is no beginning in nature. We are compelled 
to begin with an idea which is without and above nature. 
Forces and the Idea, Power and Reason, are found, in our last 
analysis, to be inseparable. 

When it is said that we know nothing of creation, I must 
suggest that, at all events, creation is continually proceeding 
around us, and within us. All growth is nothing but creation. 
Growth is a repeated creation, and creation is a new growth. 
What is this blade of grass that springs up before me but a 
perpetually renewed creation? What, but the Divine Idea 
determines its form, its specific life ? Gather together all that 
science can teach you of physical forces, it only leaves you still 
more clearly in the presence of an Idea. What chemistry, what 
doctrine of heat or electricity, what knowledge of carbon, and 
oxygen, and hydrogen, and the like, can approach to an explana- 
tion of the form which these substances assume before us ? So 
far from the force explaining the form, you will find here and 
elsewhere throughout our world that a formative Idea determines 
the forces. 

I shall have occasion again to revert to this great subject. 
Meanwhile, some one asks me. Is it a personal God you believe 
in ? I can understand no other, I cannot conceive Intelligence 
without personality. But neither am I obliged to make profes- 
sion of understanding the peculiar nature of God's personality ; 
nor am I compelled to apply what psychology may teach me of 
the nature of human personality to the Divine being. 

To him who is baffled in his efforts to personify God — to him 
to whom the Monarch-Judge upon his throne, with his innumera- 
ble host of angels around him, seems all too plainly the work 
of human imagination — to him who, when he refines upon his 
conception of a personal god, finds it melting into thin air, and 
who, when he calls it back into distinctness, finds it too full of 
humanity — to such a one I would say, Learn to see in nature 
and man the constant work and vivid manifestation of God. 
These are the forms in which he has invested himself for us. 



CEEATION A MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE IDEA. 381 

Look around you — you are in the very presence of God. Look 
within you — if you cannot see the Giver, you see in your own 
life the constant gift. This feeling that you are God's creature 
— so simple as it is — is the perennial source of piety, of purest 
consolations, of noblest hopes. 

The darkest cloud which can pass over a human soul is that 
which obscures from it the recognition of this great relationship 
of Creature and Creator. He who has doubted here, and then 
regained his faith, will feel so singular a gladness that he will be 
thenceforth almost indifferent as to what else is doubtful. It is 
in vain you urge the importance of other controversies, he can- 
not feel their importance ; he leaves your polemics to those who 
care for them, or need them. He is again in the great universal 
fold. There is peace and security throughout all the universe, 
and throughout all eternity ; for there is supreme wisdom and 
supreme love ruling and creating everywhere. Love and wisdom 
are but two names for the same thing. We call love by the 
name of wisdom when it acts ; we call wisdom by the name of 
love when it thinks and feels. Whatever such men as Cyril, 
on the one hand, or Seckendorf on the other, may assert to the 
contrary, it is not a mere abstraction that is given to us in the 
human reason : our God is very Being, very Reason, very Love. 

I, too, can recall some miserable moments, when I have 
walked forth alone under the open sky, and as the winds blew 
the great clouds along, I have felt that I also, like those clouds, 
was being borne along by a power as incomprehensible to me as 
the torment of the winds to them. How terrible, then, seemed 
the unresting and irresistible activities of nature ! How fearful 
this prodigality of life ! How fearful seemed the unpausing 
current of the. generations of mankind ! — a stream of conscious 
being poured out by some deaf inexorable Power — pains and 
pleasures tossed together, flowing tumultuously along. No eye 
of wisdom, no heart of mercy, presiding over all ; only untiring 
Power hurrying on the interminable stream. Happily such in- 
tellectual chaos did not last long within me. Light broke 
through ; the sun was again in the heavens ; the whole world 
beamed forth with reason and with love, and I found myself 
walking humbly and confidingly in the presence of .God. 



382 INTRODUCTION. 

He who believes in God is necessarily an optimist : an opti- 
mist, mind you, for that whole of things which embraces the has 
been, the is, and the ivill he. I cannot but feel assured that, if 
the whole plan of our world, as it will finally be developed, could 
be understood by us, it would be understood as one great and 
perfect idea. I may not be able to unravel the perplexities 
which human life, and the social condition of man, present to 
me ; I may not be able to foresee the future, or to trace the way 
to happier societies ; but I know, through faith in Him, that all 
will finally be revealed to he, and to have heen, supremely good. 

Division of our suhject. 
Our great subject, the progressive development of man, ap- 
pears inevitably to divide itself into Two Parts. The Develop- 
ment of the Individual Mind, and the Development of Society. 

Society is progressive, because the individual mind is pro- 
gressive, and here and there one outshoots the others, and leads 
the rest forward. Thus the law of progress must be sought for 
in psychology, or the nature of the individual mind. But again, 
the individual is born and developed in and through society, and 
what he is and becomes must mainly depend on that society, and 
on that era in which he lives. If the individual has his devel- 
opment from birth to maturity, the society has had its develop- 
ment from age to age, each generation receiving and transmitting 
with some additions, the arts, 'institutions, customs, knowledge, 
which form the social life of man. 

This division of our subject at once presents itself, and I adopt 
it. But nevertheless, the individual and the society are so inter- 
mingled, that I cannot profess to adhere to this division with such 
strictness, that many topics may not be touched upon under both 
heads. 

Part I. will contain the Development of the Individual Con- 
sciousness. It will be a brief treatise on psychology, showing 
how the mind presents us with one great, and intricate, and con- 
tinuous growth. 

Part II. will review, through some of its great stages, the 
Development of Human Society — in its industry, its morality, 
its science, its religion — and show how all these various moye- 
ments. constitute together the Progress of Mankind. 



PART 1. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

The psychologist, or one who would describe the progressive 
development of the consciousness, does not necessarily enter 
into the question of the nature of that substance which is conscious. 

I adopt, as the best result at which I can arrive, the gene- 
rally received dualism of mind and body. But, as a psycholo- 
gist, I am only concerned with the consciousness itself, and the 
order of its development, not with the substance in which it is 
said to inhere, or the essence from which it is said to spring. 
Those indeed who think that, in the simplest state of conscious- 
ness, this twofold nature of man is felt — that a spiritual ego 
stands out at once in opposition to the material world — that the 
two terms are involved in every perception — may find it neces- 
sary at once to enter upon this problem. I do not detect this 
direct intuition of a spiritual self, but receive it as the best and 
only theory on which I am able to rest. I have, therefore, for 
my present and specific object, simply to describe the gradual 
development of the consciousness. In what substance, or con- 
nected with what other powers or forces, or modes of divine 
action, God has created it, is a separate question, and one which, 
after all, may not be of the importance generally attributed -to it. 
For, if matter itself be nothing else, in our last conception of it, 

than a mode of divine action . But I must touch on this 

topic, if at all, at a later period. Let me now confine myself to 
my psychological development. 

I used to think that I had a word to say — I also — on the old 
topics of metaphysics or psychology. I have fancied that I had 
some contribution to bestow on subjects that have occupied 



384 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

many of my hours, on which I have read many books, which I 
have revolved in many a sohtary walk. This perhaps is a 
mere deWsion. Such delusions must attend, I suspect, on every 
student of metaphysics. For there are no possessions to be had 
in this region but such as we have put our own labour into — 
(Locke's well-known definition of the right of property, is cor- 
rect enough here :) and then, after refashioning the materials 
for our own use, we are apt to forget that others had been 
before us in the same task. Each one of us takes the clay 
afresh to the potter's wheel, though he turns out nothing but the 
old forms, in their old fragility. 

It has happened to me, I will confess, to have reperused a 
book after some interval, and to have found on the second 
perusal a clear enunciation of some truth which I, in the inter- 
val, had been painfully elaborating for myself. It was there, on 
the page, when I first read the book, but I could not see it then ; 
I had not worked my way up to it, was not in a position to 
make it my own. One such experience as this should make 
us very cautious in advancing a claim to originality. All 
that we can be sure of is, that while taking whatever aid was 
offered from the right hand and from the left, we marched 
sturdily on, under no man's banner, but seeking only for the 
truth. 

Section I. — General Statement, 

All our writers lay it down that we must proceed from the 
simple to the complex, and in this I readily acquiesce ; but it 
seems to me we are on a false track in seeking for what is gen- 
erally understood as a simple state of the consciousness. The 
most simple we can descend to is still a complex state. Just as 
in the material, or the organic world, the simplest atom, the 
simplest cell, is still a compound, so the simplest state of con- 
sciousness will be found to consist of terms and a relation. 
That pure and simple feeling or sensation, with which our 
psychologists so often commence their exposition, has no exist- 
ence but in their own pages. 

Writers who are admitted to be most skilful in their mental 
analysis, when describing the relations by which our acknowl- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 385 

edged complex states of consciousness are held together, reduce 
these relations to three — 1. Coexistence in space ; 2. Succes- 
sion in time ; 3. Similarity and dissimilarity in our sensibilities, 
perceptions, feelings, &c. Now, tracing back my self-exam- 
ination to the simplest state of consciousness I can recall, or 
conceive, I find these three relations. Space, Time, and Simi- 
larity or Dissimilarity, all involved in it. I come, therefore, to 
this conclusion — that there is no such thing as what is generally 
described as a simple sensation, or simple state of conscious- 
ness — that these relations of Coexistence, Succession, Differ- 
ence, are found in the simplest state we can summon up for 
examination — and, furthermore, that the most complex state is 
still a combination (of more simple states) bound together by the 
same three relations. To take our illustration from the growth 
of the plant, these relations are found in the simplest cell of 
the consciousness, and they bind those cells together into more 
complex tissues, or more complex forms of thought. 

What I cannot remember, has no existence for me. Some 
one may suggest that there may have been states of feeling of 
a simpler kind which I cannot now recall, but that which I can 
neither recall, nor form any conception of, cannot exist for me. 
The simplest state I can- summon up for examination is that of 
some feeling in some part of my body, (and which, being local- 
ized, is so far a cognition of my body,) and the localization of 
that feeling implies more than one feeling, implies feeling in 
some other part of the body, and the felt relationship of posi- 
tion. For although each of these feelings may be said, from 
the very nature of the human body, to be felt in a given space, 
felt somewhere along the nerve, still this fact is not revealed in 
the consciousness except by two or more of such feelings, and 
the relation of position. Position is to space what succession is 
to time. In order to have this simple experience of a sensation 
felt in a given limb, there must have been more than one sensa- 
tion — there must have been several sensations — and (as will 
appear more distinctly by-and by) the felt relations of Coex- 
istence, Succession, and Difference. 

We have only to look at the nature of the human frame, and 
the conditions under which it is deiveloped, to see the all but 
17 



386 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

utter impossibility that there should have been a time when only 
one sensation was felt. The body rests constantly on some sup- 
port, so that the sense of tact must be synchronous with what- 
ever sensations the great internal organs, \vith their beating, 
pulsing, or vermicular motion, may excite ; the very function of 
breathing sets at work many muscles at the same time, and the 
muscles of locomotion, stimulated from without and from within, 
are constantly altering the position of some limb, and bringing a 
fresh portion of the sensitive surfoce of the body in contact 
with the non-sensitive and resisting surface that surrounds it. 
Life enters by many gates at once. I cannot, for my own part, 
go back in imagination to a time when there were not at least 
internal sensations, and the sensation of tact on the superficies, 
distinguishing and localizing each other. 

I notice a great reluctance amongst our metaphysicians to 
admit of synchronous feelings or thoughts ; they say tliat what 
w^e call synchronous is only a rapid succession or alteration, 
and that the mind cannot attend to more than one object at a 
time. The object which they say is attended to could not be (as 
I understand the matter) an object of consciousness at all, if it 
stood alone in the consciousness ; for what is called attending to 
is only a perception of a variety of relations of this object with 
other objects or other memories. There is a constant succession 
going on in our consciousness, but there is also a constant syur 
chronism. And they are necessary to each other ; for just as 
what is called synchronous is in part successive, so what is 
called successive is in part synchronous. It is evident that two 
sensations, one of which completely expired before the other 
commenced, would yield no more towards the development of 
our consciousness, or the formation of a cognition, than one 
sensation. How could the relation of difference be felt, by 
which they are recognized to he two, if they were quite isolated ? 
Or how could the relation of succession be felt unless at some 
point they were brought together, the one commencing before 
the other had quite terminated ; or the memory of the one co- 
existing with the actual perception of the other ? The relations 
of Coexistence, Succession, Difference, will be found necessary 
to each other, and to be -all involved in the simple recognition 
of two sensations as two. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS, 387 

This reluctance to admit synchronous terms in our conscious- 
ness has resulted, I presume, from a preconception formed of the 
nature of the mind, as a simple indivisible substance, or entity, 
which could only be in one state at a time. But let the mind 
be what it will, it lives and acts through various organs, in each 
of which it has various susceptibiUties, and these various suscep- 
tibilities may some of them be excited at the same time. It is 
plain that if the various sensibilities of the man, his sensations, 
his memories, his passions, and the like, were not synchronous, 
no relationships could be felt between them, no cognitions 
formed, and none of those endless combinations constructed that 
constitute the higher region of our consciousness. 

It may be worth while to remark that the very nature of all 
language, of all speech, will reveal to us that our states of con- 
sciousness consist of synchronous terms. The logician will tell 
us that " in every proposition something is affirmed or denied of 
something." A proposition expresses some o\ie state of con- 
sciousness, and how could the predicate, and th^S^bject, and 
the relation be held together, if these were not synchronous ? 
How could I even say that " my neighbour has a black servant," 
unless my neighbour and the black servant could synchronously 
occcupy my consciousness. When I make this proposition, I 
feel that my ideas are in part synchronous and in part suc- 
cessive. 

The consciousness appears to me as one great growth. The 
varied susceptibilities of sensation, memory, passion, being given, 
these are combined into new formations by the same three rela- 
tionships of Coexistence, Succession, Similarity and Dissimi- 
larity (which may be regarded as different degrees of the same 
relationship). Just as the blossom and the fruit rank higher 
with us than the stock, or the root, and yet the same laws of 
vegetable physiology are detected in both, so the higher forms 
of our consciousness may be incalculably more noble than the 
lower, and yet the same psychical laws may preside over their 
development. 1 prefer to speak (in a scientific exposition) of 
higher forms and wider developments of the consciousness, to 
speaking of higher and different faculties of the mind. Reflec- 
tion, for instance, is only enlarged thinking. How is any thing 



388 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

made the subject of thought, but bj other thoughts being arlded 
to it ? Judgment, which is defined, in psychological books, as a 
perception of relation, is no separate faculty of the mind, but an 
essential constituent in every state of consciousness. What we 
more particularly call judgment in the ordinary conduct of life, 
is the perception of that relation, or those relations which may 
subsist between certain things or events, and some purpose we 
have in view. Imagination and Reason will not be found to 
differ in the relations which bind together the several groups of 
thought distinguished by these names ; but they differ in this, 
that the combination of thought, in the one case, is found to be 
similar to the real combinations of nature, and in the other not. 
The same group of ideas may pass under the name of Reason 
at one time, and of Imagination at another. 

I do not affect any peculiarity of language, and shall use such 
terms as Reason and Imagination with the same freedom with 
which they are generally written or spoken ; but I consider such 
expressions a*? only convenient forms of speech for designating 
parts of the great whole of human consciousness. It ia not our 
Reason, or our Imagination, that does this or that, but such and 
such states of consciousness are distinguished, for the time being 
by these names. At one time the Copernican system of astronomy 
would have been pronounced, and very justly, to be a mere im- 
agination, whilst the existence of Apollo, the god of the sun, 
would have been described as an undoubted fact. "Wider knowl- 
edge has reversed the order, and the system of astronomy is the 
rational belief, and Apollo the imagination. 

Section II. — A Sensation felt in Space the simplest Element or 
State of Consciousness. 
If I were a physiologist, I should beg you to notice that the 
immediate organ of sensation is the central organ of the brain, 
and that this is affected by the simultaneous and successive 
operation of various nerves ; that it is not apparently the affec- 
tion of any one soUtary nerve that produce* in or through the 
brain a recognizable state of consciousness ; tliat very evidently 
in what we call organs of special sense the brain is affected 
through more than one class of nerves ; that, for instance, in the 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 389 

c:i-e of vision, it is not the brain as affected only by the optic 
nerve that pro<luces vision, but the brain as simultaneously 
affected by tlie optic nerve and nerves of tactual sensation. 
And I should call upon you at once to observe, that what 
psychologists have called association of ideas is. in this and other 
the like cases, no other than t/ie original complex action of the 
nervous system. 

l>ut I am not treating my subject physiologically ; I am at- 
tempting to arrange the order of development (in the manner of 
psychologists) by an examination of the consciousness itself — a 
task, I may observe, as necessary and useful to the physiologist 
as to any other, since, before he can trace any state of conscious- 
ness to an orgimic cause, he must know precisely what state 
of consciousness it is he is dealing with., I must therefore com- 
mence my exposition by encountering still more closely an error 
very prevalent amongst our psychologists, and productive, as it 
seems to me, of very great confusion. 

These writers are in the habit of commencing their description 
of our states of consciousness with what they call a simple sen- 
sation, felt, they say, not in space, but in the mind only. Xow, 
this is an elementary state or condition quite imaginary. We 
know of no such thing as a sensation felt nowhere — a sensation 
not felt in space. This ** pure subjective sensation.'' as it is 
sometimes called, is a mere coinage of the schools, a mere 
hypothesis. I appeal to every class of men. learned or simple, 
whether they ever had, or can conceive of a sensation felt no- 
whei^. It may have indefinite or inconstant boundaries, and 
thus l>e, as we say, imperfectly localized ; but the most obscure 
internal sensation is felt in some part of the body, and :ilways 
was felt there. 

It is well known that, starting from this pure suhjectivify, our 
modern schoolmen have had the greatest ditfioulty in accounting 
for our knowledge of the external world. If a spiritual essence, 
not in s^Kice, feels only in itself, how is it ever to get beyond, or 
out of this «'/;7 Keen critics have pronounced that the diffi- 
culty is insupemble. Happily it is entirely of our own making. 
There is no such pr^>blem put by nature before us, as how to 
make the ti-ausitiou from this subjective state to the knowledge 



390 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

of an external object. Our Jirst consciousness lies in space, and. 
it is the relation between two such consciousnesses that reveals 
each other as being in space. The true subjectivity, the real 
spirituality of man, is the later development : memories, and 
combinations of memories, aided by language — states of conscious- 
ness M'hich become independent of any special locality. We 
reverse entirely the order of nature, by commencing our expo- 
sition with states of consciousness unfettered to space, and looking 
down from these to the simple perceptions of sense. We begin 
our lives with a quite sensuous existence ; we are at first mere 
sensitive bodies opposed to non-sensitive bodies ; we rise into a 
spiritual existence by memories, and those combinations of me- 
mories we call reason and imagination. But I must not proceed 
too rapidly. There is a good deal to clear away just at this 
starting-point. 

That we always feel, and always have felt, a sensation some- 
where, will seem to the generality of mankind so palpable a 
truism, that their wonder will be how an opposite statement 
could possibly have been made. But the plain testimony of the 
consciousness was departed from, because it was thought to con- 
tradict the theory of the spiritual nature of the mind. Having 
described the real and sole seat of the consciousness to be a 
spirtual essence, not itself occupying space, how could its own 
simple elementary sensation be felt, it was said, in any thing but 
itself, and therefore in a quite unlocalized manner ? An argu- 
mentative inference (as has often happened) was allowed to pre- 
vail over the plainest experience. 

No such inference, however, I must observe, is necessarily 
drawn from the spiritual nature of mind. The follower of Kant 
draws no such inference, who lays it down that " Time and Space 
are forms of the Sensibility." Sir William Hamilton, our northern 
representative of this department of philosophy, draws no such 
inference, but exposes the fallacy of his predecessors, Brown, 
Stewart, and others, and shows that their starting-point of a 
pure subjectivity was a fatal error, legitimately conducting them 
to some sort of idealism. I do not wish, for many reasons, to 
use the phraseology of the Kantian, nor do I wish to adopt the 
reasoning of Sir William Hamilton, because it is complicated 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 391 

with a theory of the self, or the ego, to which I have not been 
able to yield assent. I merely mention these great authorities 
to show that this elementary pure sensation, unconnected with 
space, which is still so great a favourite with our metaphysicians, 
is not a necessary inference from our belief in the spiritual nature 
of the ultimate seat of our consciousness. 

How prevalent this dreamy hypothesis that commences our 
life with a pure subjectivity still is amongst us, I had a strikinor 
instance just before I left England. One of our last psychological 
writers that has attracted attention (I am writing Anni Domini 
1850) is Mr. Morell. The most popular and the most instruc- 
tive of our text-books of physiology is the work of Dr. Carpenter. 
Well, the physiologist quotes the metaphysician, and both appear 
to have no doubt whatever that the infant mind feels, reasons, 
wills, in some purely subjective manner, before it has any cogni- 
tion of a world in space. Here is my note from Dr. Carpenter ; 
the italics are in the original : — 

" If, as has been well remarked by Mr. Morell, we could by 
any means transport ourselves into the mind of an infant before 
the perceptive consciousness is awakened, we should find it in 
a state of absolute isolation fi-om every thing else in the world 
around it. Whatever objects may be presented to the eye, the 
ear, or the touch, they are treated simply as suLjecfive feelings, 
without the mind possessing any consciousness of them as ohjects 
at all. To it the inward world is every thing, and the outward 
world is nothing." 

That the eminent physiological writer to whom all non-profes- 
sional readers have been so especially indebted, should quote 
with assent a passage so little accordant with the general tenor 
of his own speculations, is an additional proof that he considered 
he was referring to what was the received doctrine amongst meta- 
physicians. But what a strange wild doctrine it is ! " Before 
the perceptive consciousness is awakened ! " Carry back your 
thoughts to such a time, if you can, what Avill you discover ? 
Just nothing at all. The earliest sensations are building up this 
perceptive consciousness. Inasmuch as they are felt in space, 
they are cognitions as well as sensations. What there is of con- 
sciousness at all is both perceptive and sensational. This little 



392 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

infant Fakir, living " in a state of absolute isolation from every 
thing else around it," is to me utterly inconceivable, is a mere 
nonentity. Sensations in its own little body, sensation on its 
superfices, sensations in its muscles, are all localizing each other 
by relations felt between them ; which feeling of relationship you 
shall also call a sensation or sensibility, if you will. These make 
up its psychical existence. So far from living out of space, it 
lives entirely in space. 

You may ascribe the perception of these relations of coexist- 
ence, succession, diversity, to the spirit, or the reason of man, — 
describe it as a primary act of the reason ; only do not, as some 
have done, call it reasoning. No less an authority than Lord 
Brougham could fall into such a mistake as to say, " The very 
idea of diversity implies reasoning, for it is the residt of a com- 
parison." Comparison is no other than the perception of this 
diversity. You cannot make a perception of diversity an infer- 
ence of the reason ; there can be nothing earlier in the mind from 
which to infer it ; it springs simultaneously with sensations them- 
selves. To know that you have had two sensations, is to have 
felt the difference between them. 

There ought to be no needless mystery thrown over these re- 
lations of Space, Time, and Difference. Every sensation is felt 
where the nerve lies, and ivhen the nerve is affected ; but one 
solitary sensation could not be recognized as in space, neither 
could it have any order of succession, nor any difference or simi- 
larity. If such a thing exists, it is not a consciousness. From 
two or more sensations these relations spring, and there is consti- 
tuted a recognizable state of consciousness. 

Section III. — Touch. 
Our internal sensations, and the superficial sensation of tact, 
localize each other. Without an " internal " there would be no 
recognizable " superficial," and vice versa. Each individual sen- 
sation is felt, you say, where the nerve lies, but there must be 
two points at least for the recognition of position. By simulta- 
neous sensations, internal and superficial, there arises a con- 
sciousness of our own bodies as occupying space. Nor am I able 
a moment to pause between this knowledge, and the consciousr 



DEAT:L0PMENT of the INOmOUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 393 

ness of the relation in space between our own bodies and the 
non-sensitive bodies around us. For we no sooner live than we 
move. The several sensations already described, internal and 
superficial, together with those of muscular movement, constitute 
the perception of touch. 

No one indeed supposes there is any difficulty in arriving at 
the knowledge of the external world, if the knowledge of our own 
bodies as existing m space is given. 

This last knowledge not given, no ingenuity can explain the 
process by which we obtain our belief in the external world. To 
introduce the feeling of muscular movement is idle, if the limb 
that moves has not been, as the learned say, cognized as in space. 
And what is the sense of resistance to a creature not recognizing 
itself in space ? 

When philosophers represent to me the infant, in its purely 
subjective state, as willing to move, and finding an obstacle, and 
then calling the will the me and the obstacle the not-me, and so 
getting, at the same instant, a knowledge of itself and of the ex- 
ternal world, — I am lost in the maze of absurdities that rise up 
before me. How can the human being will till there is knowl- 
edge what to will ? It must have moved by spontaneous or 
involuntary contractions of the muscles, or by a certain wwantici- 
pated effort, before it could have wished to move, or have moved 
by an intended or anticipated effort. It must have known what 
motion was, and if it had known this, the whole problem would 
have been already solved. This infant, if it could will any thing, 
could only will the return or prolongation of a certain supposed 
subjective sensation attendant on muscular movement. And why 
should the not-me — that whicli prevents this desired sensation — 
be any thing in space ? why more in space than the me ? Some 
power or force opposed to its will seems all that the infant could 
think of Our cogitative infant might as well think it was another 
and opposing will as any thing else. No real world comes out to us 
in this way. Even very acute writers seem to be misled by the 
double use of the word " internal." It is employed both to mean 
spiritual, and also the space within a certain boundary. Now, it 
is only in the last sense that its correlate is external in space. 
Draw a circle, and you immediately have a within and a without. 
17* 



394 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

To a bounded sensitive body there is necessarily an external space 
or external body. Bat the opposite to this spiritual ivill of our 
quite spiritual infant, must be just as mysterious as the will itself. 
There is nothing to posit it in space. 

How strange a business is the explanation given by Reid and 
Stewart of our perception of touch ! Nothing in ancient or 
mediasval philosophy seems more fantastic. There is first a mere 
sensation unconnected with space, and from this the mind passes, 
as by a mysterious symbol, to the perception of touch. Such 
curious machinery is invented because the sensation of tact could 
not be supposed to be felt at once in our own body. 

Section IV. — Vision. 

I have said that the internal and the superficial sensations 
assist in localizing each other, and thus producing the conscious- 
ness of our sensitive bodies in space. This being given, resist- 
ance to muscular movement becomes intelligible ; and these 
together constitute our perception of Touch. I have now to add 
that this perception of Touch is a necessary condition of Vision. 
Without the position in space given to us by this perception, 
there could be no vision. I must be conscious of standing here^ 
or I cannot see the object there. If the image given by the light 
were the sole consciousness, it would not be vision. The neces- 
sary relation between the here and there would not be felt. The 
consciousness, so to speak, would be solely in the image of sight. 
But my body standing here in close contact with the earth, and 
many contiguous things more or less remote, has its given posi- 
tion. By which means this other position of the luminous form is 
recognized, and becomes to me a cognition. 

But how shall we describe this new sensibility of light and 
colour, which of itself would not be vision, but which, given 
to a creature who has already the perception of Touch, consti- 
tutes the conspicuous element in the perception of vision ? We 
said that our sensations were from the commencement localized. 
Here is one localized in a space beyond the body. If numerous 
points of contact upon the skin are felt as covei'ing a certain area 
on the superficies of the body, this seems only in consistency 
with the nature of our physical frame. The nerves of touch are 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 395 

there. But if points of still more subtle contact upon the retina 
of the eye, are not felt on the retina, but give, as their result, 
the sensation of a corresponding luminous area in a space 
beyond the eye, this seems a strange anomaly. It is as if one 
should say we felt out of the body. 

Nevertheless, I must accept the anomaly just as I find it. 
Such is, in fact, the nature of this sensibility. It is not local- 
ized on the retina. The subtle touch of light has this result of 
a luminous point in some space beyond the retina. 

I have read with attention the received explanations of the 
matter, and have come to the conclusion that, in the present 
state of our knowledge, the only true philosophy is to accept 
the simple fact as it stands before us. All the ordinary ex- 
planations proceed upon the assumption that there was once a 
sensation of colour not localized in a space beyond the eye. 
This is a mere hypothesis, and what is more, a really incon- 
ceivable hypothesis. Try and imagine the sensation of colour 
or light localized in the retina, or not localized at all, it has 
ceased to be the sensation of colour. The sensation of heat 
marks out an area more or less distinct on the surface of my 
body ; the sensation of light marks out an area more or less 
distinct in a space beyond the superficies. Try and conceive 
this last on the superficies, and you have conjured up some new 
sensation similar to heat, but the sensation of light is utterly gone. 

It requires a little moral courage to rest in the simple un- 
learned statement I have made. But it is far better to accept 
nature's apparent anomaly than to have recourse to a fantastical 
hypothesis to exi)lain it. Our psychological writers interpolate 
an imaginary sensation, which was once they say felt, either on 
the retina, or in the mind, but which is not recoverable by us, 
owing to the obstinate associations it has formed with the per- 
ception of touch. Dugald Stewart, and others of his school, 
place this original sensation in the mind, and then proceed to 
explain vision as they explained the perception of touch. This 
writer more than once draws our attention to the "remarkable 
fact " (!) that the sensation of colour or light, " which has in 
itself no outwardness " — a mere mental state — " having no simi- 
larity whatever to the thing expressed" — should become so 



396 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

associated with the external forms in space, "that we find it 
impossible to conceive of it apart from some extended surface." 

If by " extended surface " is meant a resisting surface, it is 
quite possible to conceive of it apart from such a surface. Press 
the optic nerve with your finger, you have a globe of light which 
you do not connect with any resisting substance. But what is 
truly impossible, is to conceive this sensation of light that has " no 
outwardness." A luminous appearance in outward space is just 
the simplest fact we can get at. Science, some future day, may 
present us with a nearer insight into the matter ; at present it 
stands thus : — contact upon the retina by some subtle matter is 
not followed by the sense of tact, or by any sensation localized 
on the retina, but by a sensation of points of light, in the direction 
from which those delicate touches come. 

No doubt there are associations with the sense of touch which 
fix for us the relative distance of visible objects. It is possible 
that all visible appearances might appear originally at the same 
distance from the retina. But a sensation of light that has " no 
outwardness," is not a sensation of light at all. We are merely 
uttering words to which we can attach no meaning. The pain 
felt in the eye itself, from excessive or sudden light, is another 
matter. The sensation of light itself is no other than this mar- 
vellous apparition in space. 

I must observe that the phrase " association of ideas " is not 
applicable to all the combined operation of the senses of touch 
and sight. I have said that of itself the eye could not give us 
vision, because the position of the luminous form beyond us, is 
only revealed by the position in space already acquired by touch. 
But this is a case of the joint operation of two organs of sense, 
not of association of ideas. The real fact being, that what we 
call the perception of one sense, is a state of consciousness, the 
result of several senses. Physiologically speaking, there is but 
ONE organ, the brain and all its tributaries. The eye is the 
organ of vision, because it is added to a creature wlio has 
already the sense of touch, and the faculty of movement. It is 
planted on the common organ of the brain, and so becomes the 
marvellous organ it is. 

You need not fear that I shall weary you with many quota- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 397 

tions from other writers, for I have no books here to refer to, 
and must take all my store from mj own commonplace-book. 
But so fantastical is the account of perception given by our 
Scotch philosophers, that a person not familiar with their writ- 
ings, or the writings of such Englishmen as have followed in 
their steps, would scarcely believe that it was still gravely 
taught amongst us. It was as a proof of what is still taught, that 
I made a few extracts from the work of Mr. Morell, the last 
expounder in England of their metaphysical system. Following 
Reid and Stewart, he speaks of a sensation, "which has no 
similarity to the thing expressed," being a sort of symbol by 
which the mind perceives the presence of a visible object. 

" There is no similarity," he says, " between the sensation 
itself and the perception. The sensation, which is a mere 
feeling, is a sign which the mind, by its own innate intelligence, 
mferprefs into a perception." Surely a strange use of such 
words as " sign," and " interpretation," and " intelligence ! " We 
have the mind, hitherto ignorant of all things, interpreting some- 
thing it meets with for the first time, as a symbol of something 
hitherto utterly unknown. But what I insist upon is this, that 
no man, or metaphysician, ever detected in his consciousness 
what passes here under the name of the " sign " — ever was 
aware of any thing but what is here called the " interpretation." 

Assuredly, if the simple and unlearned position I take up, is 
not very satisfactory, I lose nothing by foregoing the benefit of 
such explanations as these. 

Our Scotch friends have overlaid the subject of vision with 
their doctrine of association of ideas. They seem to be afraid 
of attributing any thing dh-ectly to the senses. The extent to 
which Dr. Brown and his disciples have here applied this doc- 
trine, will one day rank amongst the " curiosities " of metaphys- 
ical literature. 

We have two eyes, and see but one image. To a simple 
man this seems a very simf)le matter. Two sensations are 
only two to the consciousness, by reason of some relation of 
difference felt between them. Two images exactly alike, seen 
at the same time and in the same place, are 7iot two, but one. 
The luminous forms given by both eyes at the same time, 



398 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

occupy so very nearly the same space, that there is no per- 
ceptible difference. There is nothing to render them two to 
the consciousness. 

Dr. Brown explains the matter by his favourite doctrine of 
association of ideas. He, like his predecessors, accords to either 
eye simply some vague " visual feehng," which none but the 
metaphysicians know any thing about. And then he remarks, 
that it matters not how many " visual feelings " the two eyes 
may generate ; these visual feelings have been accompanied by 
the touch of a single object, and therefore eternally suggest only 
a single object. " If," he writes, " the light reflected by a single 
object touched hy us had produced, not two only, but two thou- 
sand images, erect or inverted, the visual feelings thus excited, 
however complex, would still have accompanied the touch of a 
single object, and if only it had accompanied it uniformly, the 
single object would have been suggested by it precisely in the 
same manner as it is now suggested." If there had been two 
thousand images, and they were so nearly alike in all particulars 
that no relationship or sense of difference arose to the conscious- 
ness, they would, in fact, be but one image. 

As to the " inverted " image here alluded to, there is, in my 
simple view of the matter, no difficulty to be explained. The 
inverted image on the retina was never the object of our con- 
sciousness, while that upright image in the air is precisely the 
direct object of our consciousness. 

Of the other special senses I have no occasion to speak. I 
proceed at once to the Memory. 

Section V. — Memory. 
How soon memory of some kind is developed it would be 
hard to say. Any repetition of an impression, the external 
cause being removed, has been sometimes described as a mem- 
ory. In the processes I have been hinting at, where the re- 
peated or revived impression of one sense blends with the actual 
impression of another, there may be said to be a species of 
memory. But where the revived impression blends thus imme- 
diately with some other, (forming the component part of a new 
perception,) where it does not stand out separate in the con- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 399 

sciousness, a recognized repetition^ there I should not give the 
name of memory. This recognition of the past seems to belong 
to a perfect memory. 

As touch was a requisite part of vision by supplying one of 
the two positions in space ; so present perceptions, whether of 
touch or of vision, are requisite to memory by supplying one 
of the two positions in time. Without a here^ there can be no 
there ; without a present, there can be no past. 

Although the revived impression is a new sensibility, and 
must have, in general, some inherent difference from an actual 
impression, yet this alone cannot relegate it into the past. There 
must be existing present impressions for the relationship of past 
and present to be felt. AVere there no other present than the 
revived impression, the revived impression would itself be our 
present. And this is exactly what takes place in dreams. The 
senses, in that condition, giving us no actual present, revived 
impressions or images, produced by the spontaneous action of 
the brain, take the place of reality. They are not recognized 
as memories or mere imaginations, but fill the quite unoccupied 
space. 

You will not confound the feeling of the relation of succession 
with memory, for this feeling, as I have said, is found in the 
simplest state of sensational existence we can conceive ; one 
sensation is felt to follow another. The successions of the past 
are our memories. 

Let us look back on so much of the road as we have traversed, 
and note how completely the mind is a development of that kind 
that the preceding state becomes an element in the subsequent 
state of consciousness. 

Our sensations are felt there where the body is, but they 
localize each other, and the simplest state of consciousness we 
can recall must consist of terms and relations. The internal 
localize the superficial, the superficial the internal sensations. 
Our limbs move in the first instance by what the anatomists call 
reflex action, and the consciousness of sensitive limbs in space, 
occupying position, rencfers motion, which is change of position, 
intelligible. Tact and motion now explain to us resistance. 
Resistance to sensitive limbs moving in space must be posited in 



400 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

space. The infant mind does not, as some metaphysicians tell 
us, posit the cause of resistance in space, but the resistance itself. 
This resistance is, and always continues to be, our matter^ what 
we call substance. The atom is never any thing to us in its last 
analysis but this quality of resistance posited in space. The 
consciousness resulting from touch and muscular movement — 
knowledge, as we call it, of the external world, and of our own 
bodily position in it, lays the foundation for the glorious sense of 
sight. We have the here and the there. As vision gives us the 
distant object, so an tmier sense (as it has been sometimes 
called) repeats the past. And this relation of the past is made 
possible by the sensational present. The senses not only give 
us the remembered image, but some continuous present action of 
our senses is necessary to constitute it a memory, and mingles 
in that complex state of consciousness we call memory. 

Speaking of the memory, it has been well remarked that the 
periodical changes in nature, and especially the alternation of 
day and night, have greatly contributed to its distinct develop- 
ment. Events by being associated with these periodical changes, 
which can themselves be distinctly numbered, get a clear definite 
place in the order of succession. 

I would observe that there is a se7ise of familiarity, from 
having seen a thing before, which can be referred to nothing 
but a modification of the sensibility, but which does not consti- 
tute a complete memory, unless the previous perception, by 
being associated with other events, has obtained a place in some 
order of succession. When I see a thing the second time, my 
impression is different from what it was the first time ; but till 
I can recall where, and when, or with whom, or under Avhat 
circumstances I first saw it, I have rather a confused and 
perplexing feeling than a memory. When you look at any 
familiar object, as at any well-known face, you have this sense 
of familiarity ; but if you are not thinking of any time but the 
present, you do not apply the term memory to your state of 
consciousness. It has not all the elements that constitute a 
complete act of memory. 

In dreams we oi'ten have this sense of familiarity, accom- 
panied with the most egregious oblivion of events. We dream 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 401 

of a dead friend, perhaps the dearest friend we had ; we recog- 
nize him, and yet never once remember that he is dead. We 
have all that sense of familiarity by which the face is recognized 
as the face of our friend ; but in the dream this image has taken 
the place of reality, it is our actual present, and not one in a 
succession of events belonging to the past. Unless we dream 
the very incident of his death, we might see our friend night 
after night in our dreams, and not remember that he had ceased 
to live. 

The mention of dreams reminds me how closely connected are 
the reproduction of past impressions, and the new and varied 
combinations of those past impressions ; for the dream is an 
imagination as well as a memory. Perhaps an imperfect, con- 
fused, inaccurate combination even precedes in the order of de- 
velopment the precise and accurate memory. This would not 
be inconsistent with what we shall have next to say of the im- 
portance and dignity of the Imagination. It may be true that 
perfect and precise memory may not be at first acquired, and 
yet be also true that the faculty of making new combinations of 
thought, and especially new combinations of distinct memories, 
is one which preeminently distinguishes the human being, and 
conducts him onwards to his highest attainments of science. 

With the full development of memory — this reproduction of 
the perceptions of sense, in order of time, and so that relations 
may be felt, or comparisons made between them — with this com- 
mences our intellectual being, our true spirituality, and only 
subjectivity. To think of a thing is to remember it ; and when 
we say we examine any present object of the senses, we are 
recalling other objects, or other events, in connection with it. 
The very consciousness of our own poivers of acting and of think- 
ing is due to memory ; for consciousness of power is anticipated 
action, and anticipation is founded upon memory. Consciousness 
of continuity of being, of personal identity is due to memory. 
At each instant of our lives the train of remembrances of the 
past, and of anticipations of the future, meet in the actual pres- 
ent, and give us our grand sense of personality and continuous 
being. But I shall refer again to this knotty point of the self, 
or of personality. 



402 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Section VI. — Imagination. 

The term Imagination is popularly applied to any anticipation. 
We are said to be fall of the "imagination" of any pleasure. A 
repeated impression of the senses which kindles desire, or prompts 
to action, becomes an anticipation. The past is thrown forward 
to the future. No future, I must remark, could be developed in 
the consciousness without a past. An impression from the senses 
(without any reference to past time) might indeed repeat itself, 
and prompt to action, but it would exactly resemble in its mode 
of action, the primary sensational impulse. Unless this impres- 
sion, or some hke it, had lirst become a memory of the past, it 
could not have given rise to an anticipation. 

The term Imagination is also sometimes applied to what Du- 
gald Stewart has distinguished as a conception — a single image 
that has lost its place, or that never had any place, in our own 
experience. 

But the widest and most appropriate use of the term Imagin- 
ation (and that in which I now emj^loy it) is to signify the new 
combinations amongst our thoughts themselves, amongst our 
memories, amongst our ideas however acquired, whether through 
our own experience or the medium of language. 

Used in this sense, the faculty of Imagination is no other than 
a term to designate the growth of the conscix)usness, beyond per- 
ceptions and memories, by the new combinations of the latter, 
either amongst themselves or with perceptions. 

As sensations combined (through feelings of relationship) to 
form perceptions ; so remembered perceptions, through like felt 
relationships between them, combine to form new and complex 
thoughts or trains of thought. 

But, you will say, every combination, or train of thought, which 
is not a memory, is not called an imagination. Certainly not. If 
the new combination or sequence is of the events of human life, 
it may bear such a resemblance to actual experience as to take the 
name of foresight, probability, judgment of the future. If of the 
facts or phenomena of nature, it may prove on examination to 
be a representation of sequences which really take place in nature, 
but which are not directly revealed to the senses. In this last 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 403 

case it takes the name of Science. Imagination becomes Reason 
whenever it bears this examination with human life, or with the 
course of nature. We perceive, we remember, we form new 
combinations of memories (often wild enough at.the commence- 
ment) ; we compare these new combinations of our own thoughts 
with nature ever before us ; we correct and modify them, and 
thus we have science, or such intellectual conceptions of nature 
as the senses alone could not have furnished. 

We catch here an inkling of the great law which distinguishes 
human progress, — the necessity so generally imposed on man of 
passing through error to truth, through imagination or conjecture, 
to reason, and to science. On this we shall have occasion to dwell 
more fully hereafter. Meanwhile I have to observe, that all these 
combinations of memories are formed by the same three relation- 
ships which governed the formations of our perceptions out of 
sensations — Coexistence, Succession, Similarity, and Dissimi- 
larity. 

I must be very brief. I have only the choice here between 
a long dissertation and the briefest statement, such as will be of 
little use except to those who are familiar with psychological in- 
quiries. Our ablest analysts have shown, in their treatises on 
the Association of Ideas, that the three relationships I have men- 
tioned determine wdiat they have called the succession or sequence 
of ideas. In doing this, they have demonstrated, in fact^ that 
these are the felt relationships by which all our new combina- 
tions of thought are constructed. I may be able to make this 
clear by some observations under the head of Association of Ideas. 
Meanwhile I w^ould ask you to survey the various knowledge of 
mankind, and to note how the whole is governed and determined 
by the three relations of Coexistence, Succession, and Differ- 
ence and Similarity. Number and magnitude, all that the math- 
ematician deals with, are but the relations of succession and 
position. All experimental science is founded on the observed 
order or succession of events. That anticipation of the future 
which constitutes all the activity of human life, and is the main 
element of life in all of us, is founded on a perception of the same 
relation of succession. Reflect for a moment on the vast variety 
in our sensations, our perceptions, our pleasures, pains, passions, 



404 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

appetites, — and remember that this one relation of succession 
implies all we mean by cause and effect, — and you will have no 
difficulty in admitting that a perception of the diversities, and 
similarities, and sequences of all these sensibihties and percep- 
tions, goes far towards a summary of all human knowledge. 

Section VII. — Association of Ideas. 

Under this head psychologists have treated both of that close 
association by which two or several ideas become apparently one 
by their habitual union (a fact which in this brief exposition I 
can merely take notice of in passing), and also of those laws by 
which a distinct succession of ideas is regulated. 

But what is very properly called a succession of Ideas is also 
a combination, or it could not be felt as a succession. 

There is a certain vague impression generally connected with 
the expression " laws of association," as if they gave us a greater 
insight than they do into the nature of the human mind. When 
it is stated that the relation of similarity or succession, or any 
other relation, governs the succession of ideas, it seems to be 
frequently overlooked that the relationship between any two 
terms of our consciousness, could not possibly account for the up- 
rise in the consciousness of one of these terms. Both must be 
present in the consciousness before the relationship is felt. I 
cannot recognize that one thing is like another till both are pres- 
ent in the consciousness. When we speak of the relationship 
between two ideas, we of course speak o^ felt relationship, of a 
feeling which is itself part of the consciousness. It cannot be 
this feeling that carries us forward from one idea to another, 
since both ideas must be there in order for this feeling to 
exist. 

What the psychologists have demonstrated in their laws of the 
association of ideas is, that certain relations enter into every com- 
bination of thought wliich forms at the moment our state of con- 
sciousness. And they have shown that these relations are the 
J;liree I have so frequently mentioned. 

It follows, that if these relations exist in every new combina- 
tion, they must give us indirectly the law of succession amongst 
the elements of any state of consciousness. But a feeling which 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 405 

cannot exist till both terms are present, cannot be the link by 
which the one ushers in the other. 

Even in simple memory I cannot have the feeling of memory 
till I have remembered. What determines the uprise of this or 
that state of consciousness, lies helow the consciousness — lies in 
laws or powers to which the consciousness does not reach. A 
Materialist, I presume, would connect the consciousness immedi- 
ately with certain vital actions or functions of the brain. The 
brain acts so and so, by the same laws of vitality that the heart 
beats, or the lungs play, or the artery and the nerve cooperate in 
their subtle functions ; and the result is such and such a feeling, 
or combination of feelings. A Spiritualist will remind us that the 
mind is not only that which is conscious, but also that power 
which determines what the consciousness shall be. But in both 
cases it is to an unconscious power, or a power acting here un- 
consciously, to which we are referred. To my mind, both Mate- 
riahst and Spiritualist conduct us at this point directly to the 
power of God, whose creatures we alike are, whatever we call 
that substance which He has chosen to endow with the wondrous 
faculty of consciousness. Can we, indeed, form any idea what- 
ever of substance, except as the power of God ? 

We can state the laws by which these combinations of thought 
are formed, but the power from which they proceed, or the lim- 
its imposed upon their growth, remains a profound mystery. 
The botanist can show us that for every leaf, and stem, and 
flower there are certain laws of growth : he can trace the tissue 
to the cell, but he has no law to determine why one tree rises to 
the height of sixty feet, and why another scarcely leaves the 
ground. In like manner the psychologist can point out to us 
certain laws of mental growth or development, but he can 
assign no law to determine the limit or extent of this develop- 
ment — why it should advance to such a point and no further, or 
why it should advance at all. We can here only refer at once 
to the Divine Idea. Our familiar illustration will serve us also 
in another point of view. We say of the seed that it has a 
certain power to grow the plant ; yet it is a mere inicighiation 
that draws the plant out of the seed. The seed brings but its 
share, is but the starting-point, gives little more than tlie fixed 



406 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

spot where tlie various powers of nature (some fetched from 
the sun itself) meet to create the plant. And so we say of the 
mind of man, that it has the power to think, and build up its 
consciousness, and grow its tree of knowledge ; but a whole 
world around has been busily helping ; and here, also, we have 
a creation of God out of still more complex materials and forces. 
We ore this tree of knowledge ; we did not grow it. 

But it is time that I turn to another phase, or other elements 
of our consciousness — namely, to the Emotional. 

Section VIII. — Pain, Pleasure, Passion, Appetite, Sensibilities 
that immediately induce movement. 

Every sensation is or becomes a cognition, inasmuch as it is 
felt in space. But it may be, and perhaps always is, something 
else. It is to some degree a pleasure or a pain. It may also 
prompt to inmiediate movement. We start if we are pricked, 
and that independently of any experience that teaches avoidance 
from injury. 

Our passions and our appetites also stimulate to movement — 
put in violent exercise certain limbs or muscles — in quite as 
simple, and therefore inexplicable, a manner as a mere puncture 
does. No explanation can be given of our appetites and pas- 
sions, or the effect they have upon our muscular system. Hun- 
ger, thirst, feap, anger, like physical pain, move to violent efforts, 
that are the foundation of voluntary movements. They act prior 
to, or independently of, any thing we call Thought. 

Man shares to some extent with the lower animals in these 
primary impulses. The term Instinct, which has been used in 
so many different senses, applies, in the most definite meaning 
which has been attached to it, to this connection between certain 
sensibilities, or feelings, and certain consentaneous movements of 
the limbs and organs of the creature. An animal sees or scents 
some other animal, and straightway feels terror, and takes to 
flight. This terror may be described as some new sensation or 
sensibility pervading and agitating the frame of the animal. Or 
perhaps it scents another animal, and straightway feels appetite, 
and pursues and devours. In the animal that flies, there is first 
the susceptibility of scent, then the diffused feeling through the 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 407 

agitated frame that we call fear, then the flight. In the animal 
that pursues, there is the appetite of hunger leading to the chase 
and the capture. We must hand over these facts to the physi- 
ologist. He may probably explain to us something more than 
we hitherto know of the machinery connected with all this play 
of the consciousness. As matters of consciousness, we must 
simply accept and record the flicts. 

In the human being there is the same direct sequence between 
sensibilities or passion, and movements. The feeling of anger 
admits of as little explanation as that of pain. In the simplest 
cases it is nothing but pain diffusing its agitating influence 
through the nervous system, prompting to contortions and to 
violence. The rage of hunger and the rage prompted by an 
injury, are equally spontaneous. How soon memories and 
anticipations (thought) mingle with our passions, I need not say. 
There is no state of anger that an adult person experiences that 
is not mingled up with thought, or chiefly prompted by it. But 
anger itself is an emotion Avhich, in the course of development, 
precedes thought. I can no more explain it than I can explain 
hunger or thirst, and the first actions these prompt to. Fear 
that impels to flight. Anger that drives us to destroy. Sympathy 
with another's pains and emotions, which induces us to help him 
in his distress, or share in his passions, Love and Joy (at first 
scarce distinguishable) which flow from pleasures received, and 
which attract us to the giver — these I find to be original sensi- 
bilities of the human being. Nor can the human being be said 
to have exclusive possession of them. 

I glance at the passions as seen in the lower animals, because 
we cannot very well imagine that in them they are preceded by 
any processes of thought. In the adult human being they have 
been so inextricably mingled up with memories and anticipa- 
tions, that it is difficult to recognize them here in their true order 
of development. If any one, indeed, should ask me why I call 
the instinctive feeling of the hare, that flies from the hounds, by 
the name of fear ? I can only answer by asking another ques- 
tion : Why do I call the feeling of the same hare, if I pinch its 
foot, by the name of pain ? I can in both instances judge only 
by the outward signs which I know in the human being to be 



408 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

accompanied by pain and fear. And if I may say that animals 
have fear, then throughout the animal creation no one can doubt 
that fear is either to be described as itself a sensational state, or 
as an emotion directly consequent on sensation. 

It is this connection, established by nature between sensation 
or passion and muscular contractions, which lays the foundation 
for will, or voluntary movement. 

Section IX.— The Will. 

Sensations or perceptions at first excited or produced by 
external stimulants on the organs of sense, and through them on 
the brain, are afterwards reproduced as ideas, without these 
external stimulants, by the sole action, we say, of the brain. 
So alwSO certain of our muscular movements, which in the first 
instance are due to some cerebral function put in action by an 
external stimulant, are afterwards repeated as from an internal 
stimulant. Just as the brain originates an idea by its own 
proper action, so it originates (in connection with this idea or a 
revived sensation) a movement. This power of action from 
within is what, I presume, writers mean by volition (or mere 
effort) when they use that term in distinction to will, or volun- 
tary movement. 

Some contend that it is not necessary that the brain in this 
case should have been first prompted to its function by an exter- 
nal irritant. We cannot remember, before we have perceived, 
but we might, they say, have moved frojn within, before we had 
moved from an impulse or sensation derived from without. 
This is a question I do not pretend to decide. The statement 
I have made seems to me the more probable, the more favoured 
by analogy. By what is indisputable, and a fact to be borne 
in mind, is, that we have this cerebral power of originating 
motion, just as we have this cerebral power of originating 
thought, independently of external impulse. But this power 
alone (and more than that of thinking alone) is not what we 
call will. It is the union of the two — it is anticipated move- 
ment — it is effort for an object or desire, which constitutes a 
voluntary action, or that state of consciousness we call free will. 
It is the relation between thought and act that gives our sense 
of Power. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 409 

Physiologists speak of muscular movement produced by irrita- 
hility alone ; a nerve is in some way aiFected, but not to tiie pro- 
duction of sensation, and movement follows. The Psycholoo-ist 
has only to do with this irritability when it is exalted to, or 
accompanied by, sensation. He has to remark that it is precisely 
this fact, that sensation is followed by movement, which lays the 
foundation for the next most important development of life. 
For it has been detected by those who have minutely examined 
this subject, that, in willing to move, the anticipation or idea of 
movement awakes a certain guiding sensation, which is im- 
mediately followed by muscular contraction. 

We desire to move, and we move; or we revive, by our 
thoughts, passions which lead directly (as explained in the 
last section) to certain movements. In either case our limbs 
are placed, so to speak, at the disposal of our thoughts. 

No little perplexity, it seems to me, has arisen from the habit 
of speaking of the will, meaning thereby a voluntary act, as if it 
were some simple energy, or simple state of consciousness. Our 
free will is the felt relationship between thought, or desire, and 
action. We indeed often describe a mere mental resolution 
(which of itself is a mere act of judgment, perception of rela- 
tions) as an instance of will ; but in this case the resolution or 
judgment has reference always to some action or course of con- 
duct to be pursued. It may be a determination to refrain from 
some act, but the refraining itself will imply a constant control 
of thought over action. A person who feigns to be dumb might 
be said to do nothing ; yet to accomplish such a purpose as this 
would require - a remarkable control of thought over all the 
muscles connected with speech. A judgment or decision which 
has no reference to our own conduct, never receives the name 
of will. A judge who decides a point of law, or the man of 
science who gives you his advice where to dig for water or for 
coal, is never said to exercise his will in this act of judgment. 
It is the union of judgment and action that constitutes our free 
will. 

If any one should say — But this judgment, this choice, this 
perception of relations, is not this free f 1 think he could be 
told at once, This judgment is certainly an act of my mind, but 

18 



410 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

I can attach no meaning to the words when you ask if it \?>free. 
Freedom is essentially a relation of succession between the 
judgment and the act. Up to the limit of our physical powers 
we act as we wish. This is a very intelligible freedom. If 
now you ask the question, Can we will what to wish ? is it not 
tantamount to asking if we can wish what to wish ? 

We not only can act as we wish, or choose, or desire, but 
experience teaches us many ways of controlling or diminishing 
any hurtful desire. We can avoid temptation ; we can place 
ourselves under good influences. What more is wanted for our 
culture into wise, good, and happy beings ? 

But how is it, some one may still persist in asking, we regret 
our past actions, if we really could not have chosen better at 
the time than we did choose ? What we really are lamenting, 
what forms the sting of our regret, are the present results, the 
ill consequences we are suffering from. While these are pres- 
ent, we cannot but regret the cause of them. But whether you 
could, under the circumstances of that last moment of action, 
have chosen otherwise or not, the past is irrevocable. Look at 
it how you will, it is folly to regret the past, unless your regret 
for the past is also a better resolution for the future. There lies the 
meaning and purpose of your regret or your remoi'se. No greater 
wisdom in the world than penitence. It is the new and better 
life springing from the old. The agony of the retrospect is 
security for future peace and future goodness. In the life of 
man, the past and the future form together the actual present 
of each day, each hour; you cannot divorce them. Your free 
will is your present power over the future. 

As it is with our own regrets, so it is with any punishment 
(other than mere instinctive passionate revenge) that we inflict 
on other men. There is always a contemplation of the future in 
every rational punishment for the past. We deter the culprit 
from doing the hke again, or we deter others by showing that a 
certain penalty really does follow from certain conduct. He 
who has formed for himself, under the abused name of justice, or 
retribution, the idea of a punishment which is not revenge, not 
the natural outburst of a creature's instinct prompting it to self- 
defence, and which at the same time contemplates no future 



DEVELOPIvIENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 411 

good to the culprit, or to society, has framed for himself, 
whether he is aware of it or not, the conception of a calm, pure 
maleficeyice. 

Section X. — Personal Identity — The Self or the Ego. 

This will be as fit a place as any other to add a few words on 
the much-debated and difficult question of personal identity, or 
the nature of such convictions as are involved in the expressions, 
/see, /feel, /think. 

" What the consciousness declares of the nature of self" is 
a problem one cannot quite pass over. I, who am more solicit- 
ous to form as wide a basis as possible, so as to carry on with 
me in my subsequent course the reflective men of all parties, 
than I am to advocate any one class of metaphysical opinions, 
am desirous of stating here at the outset, that very different 
answers may be given to this question, without endangering any 
of those great principles of religion or morahty on which the 
progress of mankind may be said to depend. And it is fortunate 
for me that I am able to look upon this, and some other kindred 
subjects, with a certain degree of indifference ; for I have honestly 
to confess that I do not always see my way clear amongst them. 
I rise into some higher truth which is not affected by the dis- 
cussion, and repose in that. Whatever the nature of my own 
existence may be, I know myself as a creature — the created of a 
Divine Intelligence. This I find revealed to me as the great 
truth, the necessary postulate of all other truths. 

There are two opinions on this subject of our personality 
which have alternately preponderated in my own mind — 1. 
That there is felt by us in the simplest state of consciousness, 
whatever that may be, the relation of subject and object: the 
sentient, or the percipient, being implied in the sensation or the 
perception. 2. That this relation described as between subject 
and object, resolves itself, on examination, into a relation between 
the several terms of any one given state of consciousness. 

I confess that I lean at present to the latter opinion. But 
I make no confident assertions, and feel no little satisfaction in 
reflecting that the decision is not of that vital importance which 
some have represented it to be. 



412 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Even the great question — Material or Spii'itual ? is not, as I 
shall have by-and-by to show, conclusive upon the paramount 
doctrines of God and Immortality ; and our answer to this other 
question, with respect to the nature of our conscious self, is not 
even conclusive of the debate upon Materiality or Spirituality. 

The spirituality of the mind may be held with as perfect 
consistency by one who derives that conclusion from some 
subsequent process of thought, as by one who founds it on an 
intuitive belief. And, on the other hand, the intuitive belief 
in this relationship of object and subject by no means precludes 
the hypothesis of materialism. I have, indeed, met with the 
argument put in the following manner (if my memory does not 
deceive me, by Dr. Alison in his work on Physiology) : — " The 
mind does not know itself as object of cognition ; it knows itself 
as subject in every cognition. We cannot therefore know the 
mind in itself; but there is one thing we can say of it with 
confidence — that it cannot be this material body which is capable 
of being an object of cognition. If we cannot say what it is, we 
can at least say what it is notP But is this statement correct ? 
If the brain thinks, it could, while thinking, know itself only as 
subject, or that which thinks. Granting that in every cognition 
the thinking power or agent recognizes itself as subject, there 
will still remain this question, Whether a material organ, which 
in the dead body you may handle and dissect, and so make an 
object of cognition, may not, in the living body, be the subject 
which cognizes ? I apprehend that it is by no direct appeal to 
the consciousness that you could decide this question. 

I will state the first of these opinions, and I believe the more 
prevailing one, in the words of Sir WiUiam Hamilton : " When 
I concentrate my attention on the simplest act of perception, I 
retire from my observation with the most irresistible conviction 
of two facts, or rather of two branches of the same fact — that 
I am, and that something different from me exists. In the same 
act I am conscious of myself as the perceiving subject, and of an 
external reality as the object perceived ; and I am conscious of 
both existences in the same indivisible moment of intuition. 
The knowledge of the subject does not precede nor follow the 
knowledge of the object — neither determines, neither is deter- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 413 

mined by the other. The two terms of correlation stand in 
mutual counterpoise and equal independence ; they are given as 
connected in the synthesis of knowledge, but as contrasted in 
the antithesis of existence." 

" When I concentrate my attention on the simplest act of per- 
ception." But it is evident that when I thus concentrate my 
attention, I, in fact, am thinking, i. e. memories are mingling 
with this perception ; and when "I retire" from this observation, 
I am, in fact, remembering — I do not get back to the simple 
state of perception. If I think of a present object, a crowd of 
oiher thoughts surround it ; if I think of an absent object, I 
have all that consciousness which makes up my sensational 
present. I can only get a glimpse of the simple state of per- 
ception by endeavouring to estimate what must have been the 
primitive elements of that state. When I, an adult man, set 
myself to think, I am immediately remembering, and it is there- 
fore a state in which memory mingles that I am really analyz- 
ing. 

But the general remark I would at once make is this — not 
that we have not this feeling of self, but that the moment I 
examine this self, I find it take the form of some specific state, 
or states of my consciousness. Instead of being involved, as 
described in the passage I have quoted, as an inseparable ele- 
ment in the simplest consciousness, it is involved as one of the 
distinguishable terms in our always complex consciousness. For 
no known state of consciousness is really simple. 

Here lies one great source of our perplexity — in the mis- 
taken notion that we commence our psychical being with some 
simple sensation, or can go back in our analysis to some quite 
simple perception. In order to conceive this same quite simple 
object, w^e coin a self which could not really be developed till a 
subsequent stage. One term in our consciousness reveals an- 
other. There is no state of consciousness recognizable by us in 
which there is only one term. 

The self which we have, and from which we never can release 
ourselves, is developed with memory. • I do not say that a crea- 
ture who has no memory, or the human infant before the mem- 
ory is developed, is not conscious of some relationship to which 



414 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

we should give the name of self and 7iot self. One set of sen- 
sations would be in contrast with other sensations or perceptions ; 
thus its own sensitive body would be felt at every instant of its 
life as contrasted with all other bodies. That would be its self 
But such a creature would have no past and no future ; it could 
not have that permanent self which constitutes the personality 
of man, and which extends through the past by memory, and 
through the future by anticipation. The self of such a creature 
would be merely its own sensitive body at the present time. 
And if the adult man could, in imagination, reduce his being to 
a mere sensational existence — if (presuming he ever passed 
through such a stage) he could get back to that stage of develop- 
ment when he had no memory — his self and not self would be 
merely one set of sensations or perceptions felt in relation to 
another set. 

There is no question that when I now contemplate any object 
I have this relation of a self which is not certainly my body, 
nor any thing in space, nor any set of sensations. The only 
question is, what is the nature of this self? My answer is, that 
it is my memories, my anticipations. The present of an adult 
man is always a consciousness which extends over the past and 
the future. It is this self which now stands over against any 
visible object that comes before him. At least he cannot reflect 
or think an instant but he summons up the past, in the shape of 
general knowledge or personal event. 

This sensitive body, you say, is not me. It is mine. Very 
true. Such is the sentiment developed in us. But if there 
existed a period when sensation and perception were developed, 
and not memory, this sensitive body was your me — the only self 
you could have recognized. Such a period, in the life of man, 
perhaps never existed ; before some perceptions were fully 
found, the memories of others were probably called forth. Only 
in the lower animals may such a condition be found. But, at 
all events, we may note how, with the growth of memories, 
and thoughts, and anticipations, the very character of the self 
changes. It is this being that thinks to whom the sensations 
now belong. This preeminence of thought (acquired largely by 
the use of language, not only as means of communicating ideas, 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 415 

but as instrument of thinking) is the real spirituality of man. 
If the spiritual essence is not developed up to this point, it 
\vould give him little cause to boast. He thinks, he remembers, 
he recombines, perceives new relationships amidst his thoughts. 
He seems to owe nothing to the earth, he travels on with a 
host of memories and anticipations of his own creating. Each 
instant of his life is but that point along the line at which he 
surveys a past and a future, projected by his own intelligence. 
This body is now " the machine that belongs to him." Its sen- 
sations belong to this spiritual being ; and when he tries to look 
back upon his earliest stages of existence, he cannot divest him- 
self of this thought self, and he sees even in the infant, busy 
as yet in forming its perceptions, a self akin to his own. 

But could we really transport ourselves back to our first 
infantine state, we should find the self close gathered up into 
the little soft body of the child. No problem has it to solve 
about externality or space. It itself is as much in space as any 
thing it touches. It lies, like the tender worm, close upon the 
earth : all its conscious self moves and feels in space. After- 
wards, thought after thought rises, and they form new combina- 
tions, and now memories, and anticipations, and innumerable 
reflections form a thinking self so paramount, that the whole 
body, wonderful as it is, seems to belong to it. This sensitive 
body, which was at one time almost equivalent to the me, is now 
mine, and in our exalted moods is held to be a very subordinate 
part of ourselves. 

This thinking self is aided greatly in assuming its vast pro- 
portions, and its peculiar character, by the use of language. 
The symbol of speech, which renders our processes of thinking 
so rapid and voluminous, tends to separate them still more in 
their nature from our perceptions. Our thinking is less and 
less connected with the material object, for even the distinct 
imagination or memory of it is no longer always necessary. 
Words, by their frequent use in certain sequence, get to have a 
felt relationship to each other, which suffices to carry us over 
large and familiar tracts in all our reasonings and communica- 
tions ; as any one may satisfy himself who takes notice of what 
passes in his mind while reading a book to which he is giving 



416 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

even close attention. Besides which, a large number of our 
terms (such as " government," " church," " nation,") represent a 
wide classification of objects and events which never were simul- 
taneously brought before the senses, and which do not therefore 
summon up any distinct imagination at all. By the use of lan- 
guage our thoughts are literally borne up into the air ; they float 
upon a word ; they are held together by the mute symbolism of 
the unuttered word. All this tends to spiritualize and separate 
the thinking self. No wonder it looks down upon the body as a 
very gross property. 

When we deliberately speak of, or contemplate ourselves, the 
I myself stands for the whole of our consciousness of every kind 
— all our sensations, memories, hopes, knowledge — so far as we 
can embrace such a survey. When we ace engaged with any 
one present object or thought, we tacitly refer it to this whole ; 
and this rapid constant reference is expressed in the " I did it, I 
saw it, I thought it." We say " I think " with just the same 
confidence and decision as we say " I see ; " yet in the " I think " 
the object is itself a thought. What can the subject be but other 
thoughts ? 

If in the expression " I think " you detect a recognition of 
the power to think, you have still to account for that permanent 
continuous self which is the great characteristic of humanity. 
\i personality is revealed in the instant thought, personal identity 
is revealed only in the memory. 

My exposition would be incomplete if I did not allude to the 
manner in which we necessarily speak when we would express 
the relation of any of its parts to a whole. It is a manner of 
speech forced on us by the nature of things, but which has often 
led to the illusion that the whole was something more than the 
union of all the parts. 

Suppose I am speaking of a monkey : I say that the monkey 
has four hands, that the monkey has a long tail, sharp teeth, &c. 
Yet all this while I use the term monkey to express that whole 
which is really made up of the four hands, the long tail, the 
sharp teeth, &c. At each time the term monkey embraces the 
very limb or organ which I go on to say is in possession of the 
monkey. I cannot speak or think of the matter in any other 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 417 

way ; for the part I want to separate, for distinct contemplation, 
is really involved in my idea of the whole. And if the monkey 
could speak, it would say, / have four hands, / have a long tail, 
&c. The / of the monkey would stand for the whole of the 
monkey, and yet, for an instant, would be brought out into distinct 
juxtaposition with some part of that whole which it embraced. 

In like manner the / of human speech embraces the whole 
of my consciousness — this present particular consciousness of 
which I am speaking being included, and yet at the very same 
time it stands out in a momentary juxtaposition with this par- 
ticular consciousness. I say / have a certain thought, / have a 
certain perception, and yet this " I myself" includes the very 
thought, the very perception. 

It cannot be otherwise. The relation between the whole and 
one of its parts can be thought out or expressed in no other 
manner. The very property which I describe as a property of 
the whole, was already in my idea of the whole. If I say " gold 
is yellow," I had already included yellowness in the very word 
gold. There is a momentary exclusion of the part from that 
whole to which it is nevertheless our very purpose to assert that 
it belongs. To revert to our monkey : if it could speak, and 
proclaim its properties, it would say " I eat nuts ; " and if asked 
to define its ego, it would assuredly put the eating of nuts very 
forward in the definition. 

Think what the consciousness has grown to be of the matured 
and cultivated man, and what he has to summon up of innumer- 
able ideas whenever he reflectively takes cognizance of himself 
— remember that the sensations that now come to him are the 
property of this ivhole, (for so he must habitually think and 
speak of them,) and you will not be at a loss to explain the 
illusion we are under when, in reverting to our earliest sensa- 
tions, we still suppose that some other self was present besides 
these sensations themselves. We can summon up no sensation 
or perception now, that does not belong to this thinking self. 

Section XL- — Progressive Development — New Knowledge, new 
Sentiments. 
I must break away from these very subtle and technical 

18* 



418 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

discussions. We have seen enough of the process by which 
the consciousness builds itself up ; and even if doubt should 
still hang over some parts of the ground we have traversed, 
the general truth of the progressive development of the con- 
sciousness will surely have been sufficiently established. I 
may proceed to take notice of some few of the specific develop- 
ments themselves. I shall select such instances as will illustrate 
the progress of society. Indeed, it would be very difficult to 
select any other ; for, as I have already observed, the moment 
you describe the development of any one individual, you begin 
also to describe the society to which he belongs. If the subject 
of your examination be the individual as he now exists in the 
nineteenth century, it is impossible not to look back to those 
past generations which have made the nineteenth century what 
it is — past generations which, so to speak, underwent for the 
men now living those earlier stages of progress in which they 
otherwise would have been toiling. 

Man's power of making new combinations of thought, and thus 
advancing beyond the direct tuition of the senses, is first stirred 
into exercise by his bodily wants. Apparently no creature has 
to get his food with such difficulty. These wants prompt his 
ingenuity, prompt him to self-help, prompt him also (the imagi- 
native being that he is) to wild petitions for help from unseen 
hands. He makes some rude instrument, he frames some rude 
worship. He enters, from the same impulse, into art and into 
rehgion. We see him at once the most laborious, and the most 
imaginative, of creatures. 

The simplest kind of new combinations of thought are seen 
embodied in mechanical contrivances, as tools of agriculture, 
weapons for the chase or for war, the first inventions in the arts. 
Here there is an application of the knowledge gained at one time 
by the senses, to the immediate wants and purposes of another 
time. A man who has noticed that wood floated in the water, 
might bethink him of passing a river by getting astride of the 
trunk of a fallen tree. I am only stating general principles ; I do 
not undertake to illustrate them. I saw yesterday a countryman 
leading his horse and cart down a hill. He wanted to rest his 
horse, and he adopted the simple expedient of putting a stone 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 419 

under the wheel to keep the cart from pressing forward. Here, 
I thought, w-as a case so simple, that the man might easily have 
been the original inventor. He hardly needed any one to tell 
him of such an expedient. He had seen stones enough on the 
road, and had noticed them as impediments to his progress. 
Here he wants the impediment; a stone is at hand, and he 
applies it. If he wanted still to proceed down-hill wdthout dis- 
tressing his horse, he perhaps ties the stone to the rim of the 
wheel, and here is a drag invented. As this tying implies the 
previous invention of a string or a rope, we have also, in this 
instance, a rude illustration of the manner in which one invention 
assists and leads on to another. The more arts, the more proba- 
bility of new combinations amongst them. 

Art begets science. You produce a desired effect with one 
thing, you try another similar thing to produce the same effect. 
You begin to classify things according to some common effect or 
property. And then, without being urged by any immediate 
need, you ask yourself the question. Will this act like that ? will 
this burn ? can this be e^n ? without having any particular 
wish to burn, or to eat it. 

Our curiosity for knowledge merely for itself, comes from the 
appHcation of knowledge for some practical purpose. Art pre- 
cedes Science. But science, or the love of knowledge, when 
once developed, is no longer dependent upon the practical uses 
of that knowledge. A new intellectual desire is generated. 
There is also another mode by which we approach science — 
through religion, or through the imagination which first devises 
anthropomorphic, or supernatural causes of things. From these 
supernatural causes w^e descend to the examination of such real 
causes as are w^ithin the reach of our observation. 

What I remarked of inventions of art holds equally true of 
scientific knowledge. The more we know, the more probability 
is there that any new fact or new observation will lead to in- 
creased knowledge. If a people who lived in tents had hit upon 
the invention of glass, it would have been of little value to them. 
Just in proportion to the number of arts already in existence" 
would be the value and application of this new art. And so with 
scientific knowledge, — the more we know, the greater probable 



420 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

value of any additions to our knowledge. The polarization of 
light would have been a mere toy at one time ; in the present 
condition of our knowledge it promises to throw light on several 
branches of science. Are we not introduced here at once into 
the progressive nature of man ? 

And here let me make a general observation, so necessary to 
be kept in view when we speak of growth or development of the 
individual consciousness. There is some vague prejudice, even 
in the philosophical world, against the doctrine of gradual develop- 
ment. What is called an original tendency or sentiment, is sup- 
posed to be much more noble and permanent than one derived 
from others, or conditioned upon their previous existence. Now 
it is precisely our noblest sentiments that come last in the order 
of development; and it is only this order of creation of which we 
speak, when we note the precedent conditions on which they de- 
pend. This love of knowledge, for its own sake, is not the less 
a new and noble desire because it makes its appearance in the 
order we have mentioned, because it might in man never have 
made its appearance at all, if his ingenuity and observation had 
not been at first called forth by the imperious wants of his nature. 
All we do here, or elsewhere, is to trace the order in this marvel- 
lous growth, or creation, of the human consciousness. " To de- 
rive all our ideas from sensation," appears to me an unfortunate 
and ambiguous expression. It seems to imply that we derive the 
higher from the lower, — the more from the less ; which surely is 
impossible. But there is a course of development or of growth 
which starts — not from a pure sensation, as I have endeavoured 
to point out, but from states of consciousness composed merely of 
sensations and the relations felt between them of difference, of 
succession, of position. 

Even writers of a philosophical reputation will sometimes (as 
when speaking of the sentiments of morality, or the love of the 
beautiful) convey the impression that there is a peculiar honour 
and dignity in a state of consciousness being original, and that, 
by showing its necessary conditions of development, we in some 
measure peril its existence. But it must be as permanent as 
these very conditions, if, by the same Power who appointed these 
conditions, it too is appointed to appear in its place. In fact, 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 421 

every thing is, in its place, as new and original as the most ele- 
mentary facts in animal life. These, too, have their conditions 
in physical or inorganic nature. All that analysis (which is but 
tracing back the processes of time) can effect, is to show its place 
in the series. You cannot reduce the higher to the lower ; 
you can only show how the lower was a stepping-stone to the 
higher. 

So far from this theory of development degrading any noble 
sentiment, we are soon taught that it is precisely the higher that 
need the lower as conditions for their appearance. It is the later 
and maturer growth we are called upon especially to admire. I 
apprehend that a man incapable of pain would have been incapa- 
ble of a rational fear — of that fear which arises from anticipated 
evil ; and, being fearless of what any other man could do to him, 
he would have been incapable of moral government. Pain, fear, 
moral responsibility, you may assign them this order of develop- 
ment, but you do not find this prospective fear in mere pain, nor 
moral responsibility in mere fear. It is itself a new and higher 
product. The charm of a landscape to the eye of the artist or 
the poet involves a great deal more in it than the vivid pleasure 
of harmonious colours, but that sensuous feeling of colour lies at 
the foundation of all the rest. You do not call the flower a less 
original or less permanent part of the plant than the root or the 
stalk. Remember there is nothing in man or nature that is un- 
conditional ; and what seems to approximate to this character, is 
the very lowest, not the highest in the scale of creation. 

Amongst physical phenomena there may be a strict depend- 
ence of one class upon another, but you cannot trace (to use a 
now frequent expression) the passage from one to the other. You 
cannot trace the passage from the inorganic to the organic — from 
chemical phenomena to the phenomena of vegetable life. You 
only trace an order of development. You cannot trace the pas- 
sage from the mechanical to the chemical phenomena of nature. 
A mass of matter might revolve eternally in space, exhibiting 
nothing but movement of the mass. The chemical phenomena 
might be conceived as a quite new creation ; we should only say 
that the new creation was built upon the old, as its apparently 
necessary foundation. 



422 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

He who reflects for a moment on what Language does for us, 
and how hmguage itself is modified and enriched as the ages 
advance, cannot fail to note a progression as well in the character 
of our sentiments as in the amount of our knowledge. Language 
is preeminently the instrument by which one age is able to trans- 
mit its thoughts to its successor. It is the very creation of the 
intellect of man, and yet is the constant instructor of every living 
generation. Language is the memory of the human race. It is 
as a thread or nerve of life running through all the ages, con- 
necting them into one common, prolonged and advancing exist- 
ence. Every one who speaks makes the air echo with a wisdom 
gathered from past centuries. The new-born child is born into 
a world of thought as active about it as the world of sense on 
which it opens its eyes. For it the air teems with knowledge, 
since it is full of human speech. The child listens and babbles, 
and the mere sounds it puts together become for it also a knowl- 
edge. 

There are some subjects, I would observe, and those which 
especially concern the nature of our social life, which never can 
be understood unless we take into consideration the history, or 
progressive development, of our sentiments. I allude especially 
to our notions of Law and Punishment, and indeed to all our 
moral sentiments ; for although the conscience may be said to 
exhibit certain great elements at all times, these assume very 
different aspects or proportions. Let me say a brief word on 
some of these topics. 

Section XII. — Law — Punishment. 

Revenge is our first law ; it is both law and punishment. It 
has been called " nature's wild justice ; " a very needful passion, 
without which one may truly say there would be a very scant 
development of life ; an altogether indispensable movement or 
fury of the soul. Revenge, for its own part, takes no heed of the 
future. What good it works in this way, it works blindly. A 
rage that is the result of injury inflicts injury. The first modifi- 
cation of the passion is to measure the revenge by the injury 
received. It then takes the name of retaliation. An eye for an 
eye ; life for life. Its punishments are strictly retributive. Pun- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 423 

ishment is the very end sought, whether by the injured man, or 
by a community sympathizing with, and sharing his passion. 

Even the community takes little thought, in its rudest stages, 
of the ulterior good to the whole society derived from the punish- 
ment inflicted. This is for a long time the secondary consider- 
ation. The punishment is inflicted first from mere passion, and 
then is seen and detected the good result that may ensue from it. 
God gives us life first, and then reflection upon life — itself a 
higher life. 

But with the advance of civilization, and with enlarged think- 
ing, the advantage to accrue to society comes prominently for- 
ward. The feeling of revenge is not laid aside, but the punish- 
ment begins to be regarded chiefly as means to a further end. 
It is a penalty imposed to secure obedience to a law. This obe- 
dience to the law has become the great end. Punishment has 
ceased to be simply vindictive, or that measured vengeance, meted 
out by another hand, which we call retribution. The jurist meas- 
ures out the punishment according to his need for it ; the lightest 
penalty that will secure obedience to his law, is the most accep- 
table to him. Even the public mind begins to view punishment 
in the light of a necessary means to a most desirable end. En- 
lightened men require the threat of no penalty whatever to secure 
their obedience even to a law which they may partly disapprove, 
so impressed are they with the indispensable necessity of a pub- 
lic law, and a universal obedience to it. 

As cultivation extends, the esteem of our fellow-men becomes 
more valuable ; it is more valued in itself, and it comes to be the 
representative of a greater amount of happiness. As the com- 
plicated civihzation of society advances, mere good opinion of 
our fellow-citizens leads to greater advantages, and ill opinion 
becomes a greater punishment ; therefore most men obey the 
law without being coerced thereto by the specific penalty attached 
to its infringement. 

In this state of men's minds the infliction of punishment is 
looked on as an odious necessity : the criminal himself becomes 
a subject of compassion. The wish arises to reform him, and 
bring him back, a good citizen, into the common fold. This, too, 
would be the most desirable result for society itself. If, however, 



424 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

ill this state of the public mind, any crime suddenly increases, 
the old feeling of vengeance is at hand ; it is immediately roused, 
all compassion for the criminal is thrown aside, and the safety of 
society alone considered. Down comes the axe M^th remorseless 
vigour. This is as it should be — as the very constitution of our 
nature has determined that it should be. It is the society re- 
leased from immediate, or great fear, that can alone view pun- 
ishment in this last phase — of a sad necessity to be accompanied 
by measures for the restoration of the criminal. 

Section XIII. — The Moral Sentiments. 

There is no part of our nature of so vast importance, or of so 
exalted a character, as that to which we give the name of Con- 
science. Here the man becomes a law unto himself; the human 
reason takes the form of a supreme rule and command, con- 
trolling the passions, determining the future conduct, and mould- 
ing the inner life into one harmonious whole. The man rises 
above the fluctuation of events, for he is constant. In its last 
and highest phase I see in the conscience the felt union between 
the created human reason and the Divine creative reason. But 
the conscience has many forms or varieties of development. 
Throughout all human history religious sentiments have blended 
with those purely moral, but they have mingled in different pro- 
portions, and both the religious and moral sentiments have been 
of a very different complexion. 

Nowhere is it more necessary to take notice of a certain order 
in the development of our thoughts and sentiments than in this 
intricate subject of Ethics. Again and again do men try to 
coerce all morality, all that men understand as moral goodness, 
into some definition that, in fact, only accurately expresses a 
certain portion of this vast subject. It is a history and not a 
definition that the subject requires. Not a few have taken the 
last and highest form of morality — a sentiment of pure duty, 
unexpectant of reward or punishment of any kind, and have 
attached exclusively to this the name of virtue. Others, fixing 
upon the lower but more general sentiment springing from the 
fear of punishment, or the desire of esteem, have altogether 
ignored the existence of any higher phase of moral sentiment. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 425 

Some (like our Paley) have embraced the motives of religion as 
well as those of morality in their definition of virtue ; apparently 
forgetful that if Virtue is that good action only which is done 
" in obedience to the will of God," vice is that bad action only 
which is done in disobedience to God. How this would restrict 
our notions both of vice and virtue I need not say. The only 
result of such definitions, if accepted, would be to drive us to 
coin new names for the old vices and virtues that cannot possibly 
be included in the new limits. A learned Spanish Jesuit in his 
Medulla Theologice, did give for his definition of vice what is the 
exact correlate of Paley's definition of virtue, and raised such a 
storm about his head as is not yet quite forgotten. As to our 
Paley's definition, it figures at the commencement of his book, 
but it cannot be said to interfere with his subsequent exposition. 

Nowhere, as in this subject of ethics, is that predilection so 
strong which I have already remarked upon — the predilection 
to believe that what is best in our minds was 'a\^o first — original, 
intuitive. This not only obscures the apprehension of a neces- 
sarily intricate subject, but tends to throw a certain despair or 
despondency over the future moral improvement of the race. 
Men, for instance, are disappointed and dismayed at the defi- 
ciency or defect observed in the world at large in certain moral 
sentiments, or moral judgments ; and as they consider these in 
the light of first truths, or primitive elements in the human con- 
sciousness, they conclude there must be something radically 
wrong or perverse in this human nature, and they can entertain 
little hope of any better development in the future society. But 
if they had seen that there were certain necessary conditions for 
the development of the higher sentiments of morality, and that 
moreover these conditions were being gradually supplied, they 
would then have surveyed the whole subject of morality both 
with a clearer apprehension, and in a far more hopeful spirit. 

Those who fail to perceive the gradual development of the 
higher modes of moral thinking and feeling, lose the greatest 
source of hope we have for the future progress of society. 
Those higher modes will extend, not only by the direct teaching 
of men and books, and the communication of ideas from one 
class to another, but also, and mainly, because a greater number 



426 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

(owing to the steady advance of arts and sciences, and a material 
prosperity consequent thereon) will be in a condition favourable 
to their reception and their development. 
K The highest form of pure or simple morality is where the 
reason of the man chooses and adopts a line of conduct because 
it is for the good of the whole. Here the reflective man legislates 
at once both for himself and for society. For himself, because 
the reason having once approved a certain conduct, must issue a 
self-condemnatory sentence if a momentary passion obscures the 
rule, or leads him to transgress it. For society, because he 
stands there proclaiming a great truth to others, in which all 
others are concerned. But this legislative mode of thinking is 
not the first which is developed : it is developed only in a few 
minds, and not in those till society is somewhat advanced. In 
no mind does it exist alone, or unaccompanied by other and more 
ordinary motives of morality. — Still it does most certainly exist. 
It is a grand element wherever it is found. It will always make 
its appearance amongst reflective minds. Over them the great 
idea of the public good will sometimes dominate like a passion. 
From time to time, in comparatively dark ages, there haye risen 
great teachers — raised up by God — I do not say miraculously, 
because, in my conception, all his works are equally miraculous 
— to be the leaders of others. Such is the plan of our world. 
Minds here and there outgrow the rest, and lead them onwards, 
whether in religion, or in science, or in morals. 

But the multitude of mankind have, up to this moment, no 
such legislative mode of thinking, and their morality is imposed 
upon them by the existing opinions of society, and the approba- 
tion and disapprobation of their fellow-men. I do not say that 
they have no vague idea of the good of the whole, as a great 
end of the moral law. but their idea of that lohole itself of society 
is too imperfect to enable them to think with clearness in this 
legislative manner. Occasionally they will assume the higher 
position, and ask ivhy this or that should be the moral law ; but 
in general they acquiesce in the right and wrong of their own 
day and generation. 

This sentiment of obedience to a law imposed on them by the 
opinion of society, and the rewards and punishments attached to 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 427 

that opinion (obedience being merit, disobedience demerit,) has 
been often fixed upon as the great ruling moral motive of man- 
kind. It is the most general and the most potent, but it does 
not embrace the whole subject. • 

For, there is not only what I have called a legislative mode 
of thinking which rises above this sentiment, and asks itself what 
is the best law for the good of all, but there is a whole region of 
spontaneous feelings, passions that lead to inflict injuries or 
bestow pleasure — loves, hates, and sympathies — which lie heloiv 
this middle stage. Below it; in this sense, that they were there 
before any law whatever existed. For the moral law enforced 
by opinion was not, in the first place, made by the legislative 
thinker. It was the existence of some law that made him a leg- 
islator. The law, in the first instance, grows out of our sponta- 
neous passions and the force of habit. 

Before there was any thing so definite as a moral law, this or 
that act would be approved or disapproved. Why? Simply 
because it injured, or it benefited ; because it sprung from hate 
or kindness ; because it immediately enlisted the quite sponta- 
neous sympathies of the whole group of men and women, com- 
panions and relatives, who were witnesses to it. There is a 
spirit of kindness moving us to do favours to each other, quite 
as certainly as there is a spirit of hostility and tyranny which 
leads us to exercise our power in doing injury. The one must 
be loved and the other hated, and not alone by those who suffer 
and rejoice. There is that sympathy between man and man 
that if you wound one you wound others also. When an injury 
that is done to one man is revenged by twenty, you have the 
rudiments of a criminal code. 

I said that our spontaneous feelings were below this moral 
sentiment of merit and demerit, in the sense that they are prior 
in development, but they are not always below it in the esteem 
they share. Let any one try to form a definition of morality 
that would exclude them, and it will be seen directly .that he is 
denying the title of virtue to a class of actions men preeminently 
value, and distinguish as conspicuously moral. To the very last 
our spontaneous feelings of kindness and of sympathy are the 
elements of human nature we seem to prize the most. A man 



428 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

who does us a kindness, not because it is meritorious to do so, but 
simply because he is impelled by his own loving spirit, or good 
nature, is perhaps the man above all others on whom we bestow 
our moral approbation. Though no idea of merit, or deserving, 
prompted him, we are ready, on our side, to pronounce him most 
deserving and meritorious. 

There are, then, at least Three distinct stages of development 
to be noticed in the full and mature morality of a human society 
— stages which coexist also as permanent forms ; the higher 
does not supersede the lower. 1. Spontaneity; anger and sym- 
pathy, and the love that begets love and approval. 2. Law ; 
the classification of the approved and the disapproved in human 
conduct, forming a rule, enforced by public opinion, to the 
infringement of which penalties more or less distinct are at- 
tached. The good and evil take distinct titles of right and 
wrong, the ordered and commanded, and obedience to the law is 
at once a merit and a duty. 3. Reflection, which grows out of 
this state — reflection on law — on the sentiment of duty — on the 
nature of the law which ought to be wedded to this sentiment of 
duty — reflection which rises to, or takes the form of, the great 
idea of the good of the whole, — our legislative mode of thought. 

This is the last phase of pure morality ; it coexists with its 
predecessors ; it is incessantly reacting on them — improving 
the customary or traditional law — modifying and humanizing by 
a still more subtle process, the spontaneous passions. Here, in 
this great idea of the good of the whole — religion and morality 
must eternally meet. For is not the good of the whole the Idea 
of the Creator himself ? Has he not educated us to this idea ? 
Is it not, when once developed in us, necessarily imperative ? 
Do we not feel that at this point the Creator has elevated his 
creature to a participation in his own Divine Idea ? 

The first sense of merit was but the echo of another's praise, 
and that first voice of praise was but a cry of pleasure which 
broke forth from many voices at some untaught act of kindness. 
And now at length all is surveyed and arranged in the enlarged 
thinking of the meditative man, and he sees how beautiful was 
that untaught affection, and he directs that voice of praise so 
that it may constantly promote the good of the whole. 



DEVELOPIMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 429 

Morality may be said to attain its perfect state when our 
legislative mode of thinking, and the conduct it prescribes, or 
say when a desire for the public good, becomes so general, that 
it gains on its side the force of public opinion, and all men are 
expected to partake of it in some degree. The elevated sen- 
timent of duty to the public is then forced, in some measure, on 
all minds. 

If the great idea of the good of all has, from time to time, as 
better and better understood, led the reflective man to contradict, 
in some point, the positive moral code of his day and generation, 
and so lost for him, or endangered, his merit with mankind, 
because he rose above his contemporaries — did the reflective 
man feel that he stood alone ? Had he risen into some state of 
melancholy isolation ? No ! It is precisely here that the reflec- 
tive man has always looked up — and to the end of time will 
continue to look up — to that Power who made the whole, and 
made him, his creature, there to understand thus much of it — 
taught him and sent him forth teacher or prophet to the people. 

I ought now to trace the development of our religious convic- 
tions from their more crude and quite imaginative stage to that 
point where — themselves become the highest reason — they must 
meet eternally and coalesce with our highest moral convictions. 
But this great topic of the progressive development of religion 
must occupy a considerable space in the second part of our 
exposition, and to introduce it here might lead to the incon- 
venience of going twice over the same ground. 

I must say a few words on a subject which has been all along 
hanging over our heads, and then we can proceed from our 
psychological examination to the broader views which the history 
of mankind reveals to us. 

Section XIY. — Material or Immaterial ? — Final Reference of 
all things to the Divine Idea, to the Divine Power or Being. 

I would have willingly avoided all discussion of so very ob- 
scure a subject as the nature of that substance or essence which 
is the seat or source of our consciousness. No greater difliculty 
presents itself anywhere than to form any intelligible conception 
of substance at all, material or immaterial ; whether, therefore, 



430 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

the consciousness is developed in this or that kind of substance, 
cannot be otherwise than a most perplexing inquiry. There are 
some metaphysicians, indeed, who very triumphantly point to 
this idea of substance as one which convinces them that we do 
not derive our ideas from sensation, or that they are not all 
developed in that course we have been describing. We have 
this idea, they exclaim, and we do not owe it to the senses — we 
draw it therefore from a pure and separate fountain of intelli- 
gence. I wish, for my part, I could find in my mind this clear 
idea of substance. I open the atom of matter and look in ; I 
find no substance ; I find points of resistance — the counterpart 
of my own sensations — and a relation of j^osition. It is space, 
position — not substance that I find. I would willingly, I say, 
have altogether avoided this discussion, but I could not ; because 
an impression prevails that there is some philosophic creed called 
Materialism, held by a small but intelligent minority, which, if re- 
ceived, at once renders all religious convictions untenable — which 
is fatal, in short, to any conception or belief of the Divine Being. 

This persuasion I wish to remove. I do not know how ex- 
tensively it prevails, but, at all events, I could not advance 
further into my subject, and leave an enemy of this kind in the 
rear — I who hold that all other kinds of progress have their 
last result and climax in a religious progress ; which last (as is 
the manner of all organic wholes) reacts upon every other 
element of human prosperity. The stem is necessary to the 
leaf, and the leaf to the growth of the stem ; they form together 
one development. 

I myself am utterly unable to conceive of thought as the 
function of a material and constantly fluctuating organization. 
I have no doubt myself of the immateriality of that which ulti- 
mately is conscious. I do not find this belief, as I have already 
said, to be a sort of intuition ; it results from the best examina- 
tion I can make into the subject by observation and reflection. 
It is a postulate of reason or science. I want a something perma- 
nent, and altogether different from the matter revealed to me by 
the senses, acting in and through the material organization, in 
order to render the process of thought in the least degree 
intelligible to me. In the vital action of every organ, whether 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 431 

muscle, or nerve, or brain, there takes place a partial disintegra- 
tion and dissolution of the organ itself. In the brain, some 
chemical decomposition and recomposition is perpetually going 
on as the precursor of every state of consciousness. Is it the 
atom of matter that goes, or the atom that stays, that actually 
feels and thinks ? Or can the thought stand poised somewhere 
betwixt the two ? Or will the active atom, that takes the place 
of the outgoing one, put in its claim ? Or does the thought, in 
some incomprehensible manner, reside in the whole mass ? Is 
my consciousness in this pulpy mass, which is changing while I 
speak, while I feel? Something permanent there must be, if 
only to be acted on, let the cerebral movements be of all the 
importance that can be claimed for them. 

It is no part of mine to contradict the prevailing doctrine of 
our physiologists — that every act of thought, or state of con- 
sciousness, is preceded or accompanied by some vital function of 
the brain. It seems, to me indeed, that it would be unscientific, 
or contrary to all we know of the uniformity of nature, to stop 
short of this conclusion ; to say that, in some instances, the 
condition or action of the brain affects the thought, in others not. 
But now, having once fully recognized this truth, why am I to be 
startled or perplexed by what follows as a necessary conse- 
quence, that if this instrument of thinking be damaged by ill 
health, or any other cause, my thinking will be damaged too ? 
Yonder piper can make no music but through his pipe : if you 
crack his pipe, you crack his music. But what is the pipe with- 
out the living breath blown into it ? ^ 

What I have been endeavouring to demonstrate of the nature 
and development of the consciousness, appears to me to afford 
an additional proof of the immateriality of that which is con- 
scious. I might bring myself to conceive of a nerve being 
sensitive as to pleasure and pain, but by no stretch of imagi- 
nation can I represent to myself a nerve or a ganglion per- 
ceiving or feeling the relationships between different sensibilities 
— what we call comparing or judging. Yet, if I am right in 
my analysis, this perception of relationship is involved in the 
simplest state of consciousness we can possibly summon up for 
examination. No accretion or aggregate of mere sensibilities 



432 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

can explain the consciousness; for the simplest sensibility we 
can call to mind, inasmuch as it is felt in space, is still a com- 
plex of several sensibilities and relations felt between them. 
This perception of relationship is with us from the beginning to 
the end. 

Seckendorf would remind me that other animals than man 
have the very same perceptions or cognitions in which I trace 
the necessary exercise of an immaterial force. Now, I feel per- 
suaded (although I cannot make this out clearly to myself, and 
perhaps, in the present state of our knowledge, it is not capable 
of being distinctly demonstrated) — I feel persuaded that there 
is some radical distinction between the consciousness of man 
and that of the lower animals. But what I cannot explain even 
to my own satisfaction, I must not, of course, insist upon. I 
must content myself with answering, that I find it easier to 
admit that other animals partake of a like immaterial essence, 
than to conceive the consciousness of man resting directly on 
the material organism. Better give to the dog a soul also, than 
try to believe that the reasoning of the mathematician, the 
knowledge of the man of science, the highest sentiments of 
admiration and adoration — that all this divine revelation of 
God's universe in the human consciousness can be reduced to 
the tremor or the sensitiveness of a nerve. 

An analogy is very hastily drawn between other vital func- 
tions and the function which a materialist would attribute to the 
brain. We find no difficulty, I have heard it said, in attribut- 
ing the power of contractility to the whole muscle — the same 
one power — although the muscle is continually undergoing a 
change of parts. If similar particles of matter occupy the same 
relative position to each other, we say that, to all intents and 
purposes, it continues to be the same muscle. Why may we 
not, in like manner, give the function of consciousness to the 
whole brain, or a specific function of this kind to any specific 
portion of the brain, although the organ may consist of parts 
which are continually being removed and replaced ? I answer, 
tBat the power of contractility is still nothing but motion ; it can 
be distributed over every separate atom of the muscle ; it is but 
an aggregate or result of the motion of every individual particle. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 433 

To make the analogy at all serviceable, we must be able to 
distribute our sensibilities in the like manner ; we must suppose 
that every atom in the brain takes its own part in the conscious- 
ness, and that it is the perfect similarity of sensibilities, or their 
perfect harmony, that gives its unity to the consciousness. We 
must suppose that every particle of oxygen or hydrogen, or 
whatever name we give to the modification of matter, can, in its 
turn, by juxtaposition with other particles of oxygen or hydro- 
gen, become sentient or percipient. The supposition seems very 
violent. And remember this : it is not sufficient to give each 
particle of matter a sensibility ; you have to account for a feeUi\g 
of relatio7iship between these sensibilities. Where will you place 
this? 

I can admit that certain motions in the brain may be the 
proximate cause of consciousness in the mind. This may be 
the link of connection between the psychical and the physical 
creation ; and for this purpose the brain, like a muscle or the 
lungs, may undergo incessant change, and yet continue sub- 
stantially the same appropriate organ. 

I have myself an unshaken conviction of the essential dis- 
tinction between matter and mind, and for the necessity of both 
for the development of our consciousness ; but what I am most 
solicitous to explain is this : Granting that some such supposi- 
tion as I have last hinted at should be thought to be tenable, 
this view of the nature of the conscious substance in man would 
by no means overthrow our belief in the Divine Power and the 
Divine Idea of which we say this world is the manifestation. 

I hear nothing with so much pain, or so decided an opposition, 
as when some very zealous but not too profound reasoner labours 
to prove that a consistent materialist must necessarily be an 
atheist. If any given materialist chooses to proclaim himself 
an atheist, that is his affair, not mine. What I assert, and feel 
it needful to assert, is. that no rational or intelligible view, call 
it by what name you will, that can be taken of the nature of 
man, leads to atheism. 

Say that you describe the human mind as a result brought 
about by, and in, a vital organism, you cannot have here, it is 
objected, a type of the Divine and Creative mind. Certainly 

19 



434 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

not. But what is understood, in any case, by having a type of 
the Divine mind? In stating the argument for the existence 
of God, a cautious reasoner will guard himself sedulously against 
the rash assumption of taking the human mind as a type of the 
Divine, in its j^ower and nature. Let the human mind be all 
spirit, it surely is still a created thing. It is not the absolute 
source to itself of its own powers ; for if so, it would be God 
itself, and not the creature of God. It is not because I am 
a conscious being, of this or that kind, that I am able to assert 
some similarity between the human and the Divine Being. It 
is because (in whatever substance or substances) God has 
created a certain state or condition of consciousness in me — has 
elevated me to a consciousness of the harmony of the whole, and 
made me to understand this whole as essentially the Divine Idea. 
God has revealed himself to man by creating in him great 
ideas, bearing a similitude to his own. In this way he has 
made, or may be more properly said to be making, man in his 
own hkeness. He has not created a being like himself, which 
surely we may venture to say is an impossibility. 

Whatever, therefore, you choose to pronounce upon matter or 
mind in itself, cannot possibly affect the consciousness. That 
we have perceptions — that we live in a world in space — is indis- 
putable, however you explain the percipient. That certain ideas 
are created in, or added to, the consciousness, is equally indis- 
putable, whatever theory you have of the thinker. So some 
may talk of atoms and some may talk o^ forces, but the moun- 
tain and the sea, and all this physical creation, remain unalter- 
able. 

Our knowledge, when you take it item by item, seems to melt 
away, vanish into hopeless obscurity. Matter is (for us) finally 
resolvable into our own sensations or consciousness ; and again, 
our consciousness is derived from the external object. We seem 
involved in a vicious circle. But here, as elsewhere, there is an 
organic whole. As the last great idea that is evolved in the 
consciousness — the idea of God — could not be evolved without 
previous perceptions, previous ideas, so it will be found that the 
very earliest of these previous perceptions becomes fully intelli- 
gible only in the light of this last revelation. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 435 

I hear a melancholy note running through our metaphysical 
books, that we cannot know things in themselves, as if there were 
here some calamity to bewail. But if things are the manifesta- 
tion of the Divine Idea in space, what more of them have we to 
know than we do know ? To inquire into this occult substance 
is, after all, simply to ask the hopeless question, hoic the Divine 
Idea manifests itself in space ? or whether there is some inter- 
mediate, not revealed to us, between the Divine Power and these 
forms in space ? I do not exalt the idea of substance into God, 
as Spinoza has done, but I lose sight of the perplexity it occa- 
sions to us in the power of God. 

Every thing exists only to us as part of some whole, as the 
manifestation of some idea. The atom, in its simplest property, 
is known as a resistance, and this implies other bodies to resist. 
It is a relation between it and some other body. And here lies 
the hopeless nature of that old perplexity — the infinite divisi- 
biUty of matter. We are in search of that which nowhere 
exists, some quite simple thing that can be conceived as alone. 
What we call the atom consists of parts, and must always consist 
of parts as long as it is an atom. 

You cannot conceive of motion without the atom to move ; 
and yet it is motion which has revealed this property of resist- 
ance. No motion, no atom ; no atom, no motion. 

And if you were to say of man himself that he was merely a 
consensus of many parts forming a whole, and could proclaim 
himself to be no other than such a manifestation of the Power 
and Reason of God — how would this militate against a belief in 
that Divine Power? 

When, in our works of Natural Theology, we read of the 
adaptation of the animal to its external circumstances — to its 
food, to the ground that supports it, or the water it floats in, &c. 
we always feel that there is here some obscurity. The animal, 
in fact, would not be in existence hut for all these adaptations ; 
and we cannot properly speak of the animal as being there in 
nature, and then look about us for adaptation to that external 
nature. Nature and the animal form one whole. The necessi- 
ties of language, and* the limited scope of our thoughts, oblige 
us to contemplate the subject in this piecemeal manner ; but it 



436 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

is plain, on reflection, tliat without these adaptations there is no 
animal." The observation has been sometimes made in a hostile 
spirit, but, in truth, it only reveals to us that we ought, if possi- 
ble, to ascend a stage higher and take a wider view of nature. 

^gaiiij — we sometimes hear those who expound this great 
argument, speak of certain forces, or even certain masses of 
matter, as first existing, and then of an Intelligence regulating 
and " collocating" them. But these writers would find it impos- 
sible to follow out their own conception. Every force vanishes 
from us, and becomes a nullity, when you abstract it from a har- 
mony of forces. Every thing ceases to be the thing it is when 
you abstract it from its " collocations." 

If we cannot penetrate into the pature of things — into such 
problems as the words Substance and Force suggest to us — if 
science give us, or the world itself, no commencement, no first 
principles — it has, at all events, demonstrated the one great 
commencement out of the world for all that is in it. Never 
more, I think, will any human dreamer put a chaos at the com- 
mencement of all things. Chance and Chaos we have got rid 
of for ever. A chaos seems to me a sheer impossibihty. Exist- 
ence and an harmonious order — Power and Reason — come 
before me as inseparable. A nebular mass (if such there be) 
is not a chaos. It is a creation where few laws and relationships 
are developed. If a speculative astronomer, in proposing what 
is called the nebular hypothesis, puts before our imagination a 
" fire mist," revolving in space, this fire mist must be supposed to 
have its own laws ; each particle its relation to other particles, 
or they would not be the particles they are. 

Thus, I think, I may state it as clear, that no materialism, or 
any intelligible views that may pass under that title, can militate 
against the great argument for God and God's existence recog- 
nized as the real source of all known being. 

You will perhaps remind me that, in my zeal to explain this 
point, I have passed very rapidly over the question of material- 
ism itself. Let us, then, ask ourselves what is materialism, or 
what is the form in which it can come before us so as to challenge 
our acceptance? Do men speak of some occult substance and 
substratum, or do they speak of the known properties of matter. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 437 

when they say that the material organism thinks and feels ? I 
apprehend that a speculative reasoner of our own times would 
do neither of these. , 

Most assuredl}' a person of reflective habits of mind would 
not make so blundering a statement as to say that the property 
of extension exercised the property of thought. He would simply 
note an invariable connection betAveen the two properties. Even 
of the property of motion he would not say that it belonged to 
the property of extension — he would limit himself to the state- 
ment, that motion necessarily implied the presence of an ex- 
tended body. It is a property developed only in an extended 
body; but extension per se does not move. 

Neither do I think that a speculative inquirer, who really 
belongs to this nineteenth century, would care to discourse much 
about this occult substance. He would say. If you ask me 
whether it is the same occult substance that is extended, and 
that moves, and that thinks, what other answer can I possibly 
give you than that these properties are developed in this order ? 
What can I know of an occult substance ? or how many occult 
substances there may be ? I know this, that motion requires an 
extended body, and that there is always both extension and 
motion where there is thought, or any kind of consciousness. 

His materialism limits itself, then, to a statement of this con- 
nection. I, too, and every one else, must admit this connection 
between matter, and motion, and thought, but we interpose 
another substance, a spiritual essence, on which this matter and 
motion act, or which acts in correspondence with them. He 
thinks this interposition superfluous, embarrassing, unauthor- 
ized. What we call the action of mind upon matter, he resolves 
into the action of one part of our organization upon another 
part. 

All our knowledge of the external world — up to the introduc- 
tion of sensation — resolves itself into form and motion. Exten- 
sion or resistance — which you may call space-occupancy if you 
will — and various kinds of motion, (of attraction and repulsion, if 
you like so to name them,) to these all our knowledge of objec- 
tive reahties is reduced. This is no hypothesis ; it is a simple 
statement of fact. When we speak of colour, of heat, of sound, 



438 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

we speak generally of sensations ; what lies out there in the ob- 
jective world are movements of particles of matter that produce 
in us the sensations of light, and heat, and sound. Resistance 
and motion are the only properties that exist out there in space, 
whether I am present or not to be affected by them. The 
belief that these exist independently of me, or of the properties 
of my organic body, I need not descant upon. To deny this 
belief is absurd ; and to assert that the belief is merely subjec- 
tive, and has no counterpart in objective reality, is only denying 
it under another form of words. A mere verbal denial is possi- 
ble, but a mental and veritable denial is impossible. Really to 
desert this belief would be tantamount to the resignation of all 
consciousness whatever. 

But space-occupancy and movement are all that we can con- 
ceive as existing apart from a sensitive body. Up to the intro- 
duction of sensibility there is nothing else known. Mechanical 
phenomena are at once recognized as masses of matter and the 
laws of their movement. In chemical combinations you have 
molecular motion. Heat, light, and electricity, viewed as phy- 
sical agents, caji only be conceived by us, either as motion of 
some subtle matter spread through the interspaces of that which 
is visible and tangible to us, or else as nothing more than pecu- 
liar motions of this same visible and tangible matter. When we 
advance to vital phenomena, what is the growth-of a vegetable 
or an animal but other movements of particles of matter by which 
they assume the new organic form ? or what is the contraction of 
a muscle, or any other merely vital function, but a movement in 
this organ ? It is not till we contemplate the animal as sensitive 
that any thing is introduced to our knowledge but extension and 
motion. We have, till then, in the organism a most complicated 
result of mechanical, chemical, and vital movements. 

What animal organization, the materialist would say, is the 
first in order to feel pleasure or pain, — what creature it is that 
first leans to the soft pressure on its skin, or recoils from the 
sharp puncture, I pretend not to decide. But I assert, that I find 
it as impossible to dissociate this new arrival sensibility from its 
two great predecessors, extension and motion, as to dissociate 
motion from extension. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 439 

You will remember our conversations with Seckendorf. when 
we three wandered together in Switzerland, and occasionally for- 
got even the presence of the Alps themselves, in our entangled 
discussions upon some of these abstruse topics. I have met with 
no one who stated the materialistic view more cautiously than he 
did. The term materialism, indeed, he was wont to avoid, as it 
gave rise, he said, to gross misrepresentations ; he would coin the 
term Unitism as a simple opposite to the generally received 
Dualism. 

I cannot do better than recall some of his statements. It is 
thus Seckendorf used to harangue us : — 

" There are two schools of philosophy, — there are two hundred 
you impatiently exclaim, — well, there are as many as you please, 
but there are two preeminently distinguished by their different 
methods, by the different courses they pursue, in their inquiry 
into the nature of man. 

" The disciple of the one starts from objective nature ; or, if 
he commences his inquiry with some needful psychological sur- 
vey, he finds that his knowledge of the external object is the 
simplest element of his consciousness. He finds that those some- 
things out there in space (whatever he pleases to call them, con- 
gregations of atoms or forces) are related to each other, and to 
his own sensations in a manner very interesting for him to under- 
stand. Between these Somethings that surround him, one great 
distinction he cannot fail to make — that between the Organic and 
the Inorganic. He finds it very possible to conceive the inor- 
ganic existing without the organic ; quite impossible to reverse 
the order. Though he cannot trace the passage from the inor- 
ganic to the organic, he sees the dependence of this last upon the 
first. At each instant the vital organism and the surrounding 
material world, with its mechanical and chemical laws, form to- 
gether the living, breathing creature that we see. Not only is 
the earth needed as a constant support to the vegetable or the 
animal, but there is a continual interchange of parts between the 
organic and the inorganic, without which interchange there is 
no life. Life cannot be accurately described as some property 
belonging exclusively to the organism. Whatever may be the 
peculiar contribution of the organism, or, to speak more correctly, 



440 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

whatever it is that is first and exclusively developed in the organ- 
ism — this alone wonld not be life. 

" Confining himself now to the organic, our student finds the 
relation of dependence here also. First, the vegetable is neces- 
sary to the animal, — elaborates the food for it, — then this process 
of nutrition is (in very palpable, and also in many recondite ways) 
complicated with every higher function of life. Tracing his way 
by the aid of the comparative anatomist, he sees organ added to 
organ, sense to sense, or the sensation specialized in an appro- 
priated organ, and raised therein to greater and greater potency. 
He sees the assemblage of limbs and organs connected together, 
and made one organism by means of a network of nerves, fila- 
ments that run up to a common centre of consciousness. Be- 
tween the central brain and the outlying system of nerves, there 
appears to be this relation, — that whereas, in the first instance, 
the brain is brought into activity by some affection of the nerve, 
it may subsequently revive, by some internal stimulant, this state 
of consciousness, or one similar to it, without direct aid of the 
nerve. Thus a perception is due to the nerves of vision and of 
touch, and the brain ; a memory of that perception is independent 
of these nerves, though, if very vivid, it is noticed to have an 
effect upon them ; in other words, the revival then embraces the 
affection of the nerves, and we seem to see, and we shrink as if 
we felt. So, too, passion, feehng, or emotion, is, in the first place, 
due to the brain as affected by certain nerves running through- 
out the body ; subsequently it is revived in a modified form, with 
less affection of these nerves. In the case of passion, there is an 
internal extension of the impulse from nerve to nerve, which has 
led many to suppose that the passion, in the first instance, comes 
down from the brain. But into niceties of this kind we must not 
enter. 

"Our philosopher, we say, of the objective school, proceeding 
from the simpler to the more complex organizations, finds him- 
self far advanced in the study of man, whilst as yet he is only 
studying the animal life around him. The unity of parts in each 
organic whole has struck him with admiration. In this unity or 
harmony of many parts lies the oneness of the creature. Won- 
derful is the dog that looks up at him with its manifest though 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 441 

limited intelligence. Eye and foot, nostril and throat, every 
limb and organ displays an admirable consent. He is one — this 
dog ; one through the perfect harmony of powers and sensations, 
desire and act. He sees you, he remembers you, he in some sort 
loves you ; your presence at least gives him pleasure ; he courts 
your caress ; he has gentleness and joy, as well as anger and 
ferocity. He too perceives, remembers, and combines his memo- 
ries, so as, in his limited sphere, to employ the knowledge of the 
past in the present emergency. But that the phrase would im- 
ply an imperfection — and he, too, is perfect in his kind — what is 
he less than an ' arrested development of man ?' 

" And now when our philosopher arrives by this route at the 
study of the human being, half his work is done. The remain- 
ing half you may exalt as you please ; but the psychical devel- 
opment peculiar to man is so intimately connected with, so 
unmistakably dependent on, that which he has in common with 
some of the higher animals of creation, that there is found no 
room or place for the introduction, for his sake, of an entirely 
new entity of mind. To our philosopher it seems that the whole 
world is one — one continuous and rising development. Vast is 
the difference between the cultivated man and every other crea- 
ture in the world ; but this cultivated man makes no abrupt and 
sudden entrance on the scene. Even for him he cannot break 
the great unity of the scene around ; even for him he cannot 
establish a new starting-point. 

" The philosopher of the opposite or subjective school takes 
for his starting-point his own consciousness. He finds nothing 
more simple, and nothing more real, than that spiritual entity or 
power he calls himself. His reason is an act of this power ; his 
will preeminently so. He asserts that he is a power living in 
nature, not a part of nature, a power animating the very mate- 
rial organs it makes use of for the development of its own con- 
sciousness. ' I am not,' he indignantly exclaims, ' a mere result, 
a mere consciousness produced in a vital organism of incalculable 
complexity and wondrous harmony — I am the conscious being, 
source of my thoughts and resolves. Such is the sublime crea- 
ture God has made me. It is from this power of my own reason 
I draw my knowledge of these objective realities with which you 

19* 



442 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

would confound me — that I get the very idea of substance or 
being, whether applied to the material or the spiritual world. 

"There have been giants of this race. But this old heroic 
race of metaphysicians is dying out — is, I think, nearly extinct. 
They belonged to the heroic age of philosophy, when men did 
great things, and the greater for being a little mad. The soli- 
tary Thinker would understand himself and all humanity, and 
perhaps all the universe, by dint of a profound self-examination. 
"We have now learnt that half our knowledge of man lies out 
beyond us, and is better studied in the forces, and in the life, 
that nature is everywhere exhibiting. The heroic philosopher 
would be indebted to nothing but himself. He would begin with 
his Cogito, and reason from his Gogito. We, of the modern and 
prosaic race, scatter ourselves over all fields of science. We 
know that nature does not begin man with his Gogito ; we lived 
much before we thought — we lived as animals before we lived 
as men — we moved our limbs involuntarily, or our limbs moved 
for us, before we performed a voluntary movement ; long, long 
was the series before the philosopher could sit apart and mutter 
his Gogito. I do not think this method of shutting ourselves up, 
and merely pondering our own consciousness, will be ever again 
adopted by any great recognized teacher of the philosophy of 
mind. 

"I certainly am not conscious of being the cause of my own 
conscious7iess, or the author of that harmony or unity of many 
sensations, passions, thoughts, memories, which constitute me to 
be the creature that I am. The cause of all this harmony which 
I see without me, and detect within, is to me incomprehensible ; 
but (as Clarence has been lecturing us) such harmony, or divine 
reason as he would call it, does indisputably enter into the very 
nature and existence of every thing we know of Embrace in 
your imagination a whole planetary system, or fix your regard 
on the simplest creature that is crawling on the earth, every- 
where you see a harmony of movements, or of properties, which 
constitutes the object you contemplate to be what it is. And 
look within yourself — what but a harmony of multitudinous 
movements, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, constitutes you to be 
the conscious being that you are. Strange hallucination, yet not 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 443 

altogether inexplicable ! That whole of many parts, which is 
your mind, is constantly spoken of as the cause of each succes- 
sive part, or each developed consciousness. I suppose if the 
tree were made conscious of all its boughs and all its leaves, it 
would think of itself as tree even when it went back to that 
period when it was simply a seed ; it would think the tree had 
grown the tree. But man is no more the author of that har- 
mony which makes him to be man, than a planetary system is 
cause of its own regular movements, or this lizard, darting hither 
and thither between our feet, is the author of all that marvellous 
harmony of vital movements and susceptibilities which consti- 
tutes it to be a lizard." 

Here one of us interposed — I think it was you, Thorndale. 
You disclaimed all pretence to be independent of nature, but you 
asserted that a Dualism of mind and matter was inevitably 
forced upon us. You declared that you must have both starting- 
points — that you must embrace both the objective and the sub- 
jective method, which, you added, was in fact, and always had 
been, the prevailing method of all mankind. How not study the 
objective or material world ? But this study leads us only to a 
material organization — we can go no further this way — we must 
take the other starting-point if we would investigate what lies 
behind this material organization, and makes use of it as its in- 
strument. 

" Its instrument ! " replied Seckendorf. " The vital organism 
is the instrument of the mind. This is the favourite analogy. 
But it is an instrument which takes the initiative. If your 
analogy be of a musical instrument, it looks very like the per- 
former. Adopt this last fanciful analogy. The material organ shall 
be the pipe, and the spirit shall be the breath blown into it. 
Now, what if the pipe have a rhythmical movement of its own, 
by which it enlarges and contracts its orifice, causing a new note 
at each change — which is the performer, the breath or the pipe ? 

" My companion takes a few glasses of wine ; the circulation 
of the blood through the innumerable vessels of the brain is 
quickened; the process of thought quickens too. But it is more 
than quickened ; it is varied. My companion grows witty, 
cheerful, perhaps eloquent. I listen to combinations of thought 



444 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

which most assuredly, without the wine, would never that day- 
have made their appearance. He drinks a few more glasses, 
and the Avit degenerates into nonsense, and the amiability into 
a maudlin humour, or changes to a quarrelsome temper. He 
drinks still more, and there ensues a complete confusion in all 
his thoughts ; we say he is no longer a rational being. 

"Now observe," continued 'Seckendorf, "it is precisely on the 
succession and combination of ideas that our rationality depends : 
this is our rationality. And here you see the very successions 
and combinations are determined by the physical condition of 
the man. I want to know what proof you could have more 
convincing than this commonplace fact I have been just describ- 
ing, that the vital organism takes the initiative ; that in its move- 
ments or functions, whatever they may be, you have the proxi- 
mate cause, or immediate antecedent, of that succession or 
association of ideas which distinguishes us as rational beings. 
Either you or Clarence was observing a moment ago, that the felt 
relation of similarity, or any other feeling of relationship, could 
not be the cause which immediately determined the order of our 
ideas ; because the ideas must be already present before the 
relationship can be felt. You concluded that the law of succes- 
sion must be sought for, either in the mind acting as unconscious 
power, or in the vital organism acting in the like unconscious 
manner. I show you a vital organism which, stimulated by the 
very process of nutrition, performs some functions that determine 
the vividness and the associations of your thoughts. It seems to 
me you have here the unconscious power you were in search of, 
or all of it you are ever likely to find. 

" In times past Dreaming was held to be a proof that the soul 
thought independently of the body. As matters are now under- 
stood, it comes before us as a very signal proof of the depend- 
ence of thought on the state of the body. In the state of sleep, 
the brain is only partially or imperfectly in action ; it may be 
roused to very vivid action of some kinds while others are sus- 
pended : the old harmonies are broken up. All the peculiarities 
of the dream correspond with this limited activity of the cerebral 
organ. 

" Strange enough this state of dreaming. There lies your 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 445 

philosopher, motionless — his eyes closed, and the other senses 
more or less suspended. Sleep has many different degrees, and 
in even what is called sound sleep many sensations are still ex- 
cited. An indigestion, or an uneasy couch, make themselves 
known by their stimulating effects upon the brain, prompting 
to some imperfect or partial action. There lies your philoso- 
pher in his sleep, dreaming the most absurd, impossible things 
— dreaming himself guilty of some atrocious crime, without 
questioning a moment how he came to depart from all his 
established and reasonable principles of conduct — dreaming of 
dead friends, and forgetting they are dead — the victim of one 
train of curious fantastical thought. What seems abundance 
of power is mere poverty : all the stoi^es of his knowledge are 
closed, and nothing but this phantasmagoria is present in the 
consciousness. It is a most limited affair, but we may remark 
that precisely that power of new combination, preeminently 
given to the spirit, is the one power that is here exercised. The 
eye is closed, and flie repetitions of the brain take the place of 
real objects ; and these mock perceptions are mingled and com- 
bined often in the most extraordinary manner. Event follows 
event, but no inquiry is provoked as to the possibility of their 
sequence. No suspicion is felt at the most astounding absurdi- 
ties ; no other memories, no other knowledge is revived. The 
man of science lies there on his back patiently agaze at the most 
monstrous phantasms, credulous as an infant. 

" You cannot say that he is any longer the same person, so 
far as his consciousness is concerned. When he wakes, then he 
remembers the dream and calls it his, and is aware of all its 
absurdities. Then it takes its place as a strange event in his 
own history. While the dream was in progress, so little of the 
past and anticipated future of the man's life was revived in the 
consciousness, that scarcely can he be said to have had the same 
personality. The blind man was seeing, the deaf man was 
hearing, the just and humane man was flying for his life as an 
assassin. 

" We sometimes argue and reason in our dreams, as well as 
invent incidents ; and you must have often observed how the 
dream approximates in its character to the waking thought as 



446 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

the sleep is breaking away. Some conditions of sleep, as som- 
nambulism and the trance, would require especial examination. 
But I have dwelt enough on this topic. To bring before you 
repeated instances to prove the correspondence between the state 
of the consciousness and the condition of the brain, must surely 
be needless." 

You held your own ground. Such instances as intoxication 
or dreaming, and others of the like description, proved no more 
than you had already admitted. This organ of the brain lies 
in the domain of nature. It must be subject to the incidents of 
animal life. It lies midway between the outer world and the 
inward spirit — is a subject both of the material and immaterial. 

If you recoiled from the supposition that Judgment or the Intel- 
lect could be finally ascribed to any other than the soul of man, 
you were, I remember, still more indignant when the debate was 
carried into our feelings and sentiments, our angers and our loves, 
and these were represented as sensibilities of the nervous system 
— sensibilities of pleasure and of pain associated with our percep- 
tions and thoughts : you lost all patience. That the mind acted 
on the body, and the body on the mind, even in our highest joys, 
hopes, affections, you readily admitted ; but that these joys, these 
hopes, these affections, should be finally resolved into sensibilities 
of a sympathetic nerve, or semilunar ganglion, was to you intol- 
erable. Nevertheless, Seckendorf, with most provoking calmness, 
would proceed with his distasteful exposition. 

" You strike a parrot," he would say : " every feather is ruffled ; 
he screams, he beats the air with his wings, he aims at you with 
his beak ; each limb is convulsed ; there is a turmoil of excite- 
ment through his whole frame. All this excitement is his anger. 
You make no difficulty here ; you collect all the several emotions 
leading to, or accompanied by, all these several actions, and you 
call the assemblage the anger of the bird ; you do not say the 
bird is angry and all these sensations occur, but the occurrence 
of all these diverse sensibilities and commotions is the anger of 
the bird. The blow had kindled (hoiv I do not pretend to say) 
all these violent emotions and commotions, whose nature is that 
each excites a successor, so that the turmoil is likely to increase 
till the streno-th of the animal begins to fail. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 447 

"If, some days after, you present yourself before the same 
parrot, your very presence recalls the blow ; you see again his 
feathers rising ; he again aims at you, and clamours vociferously. 
The same commotions, though probably not with the same vio- 
lence, are repeated ; and again you say they form the anger of 
the bird. 

" When I strike a man or a boy, does not his lip quiver and 
his hand clench ? does not his whole body tremble with excite- 
ment ? And does not all this excitement kindled throughout his 
frame constitute his anger ? He has no other anger than these 
sensibilities ; they are not the products of his anger. These 
sensibilities, moving and working perhaps every muscle in his 
body, are his anger. And if this man sees me again, or remem- 
bers mein my absence, they will be a revival of the same sensi- 
bilities. If other motives or habits have not induced him to con- 
trol external manifestation, he will still clench his fist, and his 
lip will tremble. At all events, the knitted brow, and the fire 
in the eye, will demonstrate the internal commotion of the 
frame. 

"This habitual control over external demonstration, I need not 
step aside to explain. The fact is very plain that, whether owing 
to the presence of others, or to quite physiological causes, feelings 
which in their original character prompted to violent movements, 
may exist in a modified manner in a man still as a statue. Re- 
venge may simulate the greatest calmness. And the effect of 
habit or repetition shows itself here as elsewhere. The feeling 
appears to retreat within some more limited compass ; it lingers 
about the region of the heart, the lungs, the brain, when it no 
longer convulsively stirs the hand or the foot. The effect of 
music will afford no bad illustration. A savage beats some mis- 
erable tom-tom, and works himself by its rhythmical clamour into 
a violent passion ; he dances to it with all his might. A citizen 
of London sits at a concert, and hears a most stirring march 
played by a hundred instruments, without moving a limb or a 
muscle of his face. Yet something of wliat the savage felt over 
his tom-tom is stirring in the more covert regions of his nerves — 
is, at all events, excited in his brain, the very seat of all feel- 



448 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

"To return to our parrot. If, instead of striking him, you 
feed him with dainties, and caress him gently, he bends his head 
with pleasure to your touch. Relaxing and pleasant sensations 
evidently steal through the whole body of the bird, and gentle 
emotions prompt him to move blandly towards you. If after- 
wards you only present yourself before him, he will approach 
with all these signs and demonstrations of pleasure. You say 
the bird knows you, and you do not scruple to say, so far as a 
bird can feel at all, that it loves you. Its love for you is made 
up of all those pleasurable emotions prompting to gentle actions. 

" And now, look at a little human child. See how it dances, 
laughs, and shouts ! Every part of its most delicate and impres- 
sible frame is thrilling with pleasure. All this is its joy. It 
has not a joy that manifests itself in these sensations ; but all 
these vivid sensations prompting to movement, and also called 
forth by movement, constitute its joy. It is a vivid happiness, 
to which every part of the frame seems to have contributed ; the 
little legs and arms, the throat, the lungs, the eye, the ear, all 
are busy. All are busy, acting on or with that central organ — 
the brain. What we call the cause of the child's joy — the event 
that stirred this pleasant tumult of a thousand nerves — may be 
slight enough : some toy, some novelty, some promise, or ex- 
pectation, scarce discernible by the vision of a rnan ; and in com- 
mon parlance we sometimes call this the joy of the child. But 
it is not the first stroke upon the bell, it is the whole ringing 
peal, the whole harmonious chime that is set a-going, which con- 
stitutes its joy. And note how a caress, a tone of kindness, 
strikes upon the silver bell, and how the whole chime, in lower 
tone, and softer cadence, repeats itself. From the gentle hand 
of the mother comes every gift ; pleasure and joy become love ; 
and the sweet habit of loving grows on from day to day. In 
the very young child, love and joy are undistinguishable. Strike 
often on the silver bell ! you who have these little creatures in 
your charge. Thus will a beautiful, and musical, and loving 
nature grow up before you. 

" And its grief, — is not the sigh, the sob, the tremour through- 
out its little frame — or rather the sensibilities that both provoke 
these and are provoked by them — the very passion of its grief? 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 449 

And when the child has grown to be a man, and many sad 
memories are overpowering him, what is now the state which 
we call his grief, but these memories on the one hand, and all the 
distressful feelings these memories revive ? If he does not sob, 
there is a feeling of distressful languor diffused throughout the 
whole system, an oppression on the heart and lungs, and all the 
organs of life ; and if these sensibilities, when revived by thought, 
should be limited (so to speak) in the area over which they 
exert themselves, and should be no longer traced through the 
whole body, but confined to the brain, this by no means alters 
their real nature, so that they can be any thing else than bodily 
feelings." 

I think I have now given this subject — through these reminis- 
cences of Seckendorf — quite as much prominence as it deserves. 
It would be useless to repeat the reasonings by which we have 
been both persuaded that the old-fashioned Dualism is the only 
philosophy in which we can rest. 

But now, let me once more make the observation with which 
I commenced this section — Adopt this Unitism of Seckendorf's 
— see in man the climax, as it were, of the whole powers of 
nature — what is there here to contradict our great truth, that 
this whole can be conceived only as the manifestation of the 
Divine Idea? 

I like that formula of Oersted's, " Every thing that exists 

Xdepends upon the past, prepares the future, and is related to 

the whole." Is it not indisputably true ? And how can past, 

present, and future, be related in one whole, if that whole is not 

the divine eternal idea of the Omnipotent ? 

All growth is but repeated creation. Creation is but new 
growth. I call upon you to see in the human species God's 
last creature upon this earth — a creature whom God may be 
still said to be creating — which from 'age to age puts forth new 
growth ; for what are new truths, new sentiments, but new 
psychical growths or creations ? 

And is it not true that, just in proportion as our scope of 
thought is enlarged, we must rise into grander conceptions of 
the Creator, and feel, in the very truth of being his creature, 
an inexhaustible source of piety and of hope ? Say that each 



450 DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

one of us has but this present life, how great this life becomes — 
great in its ample vision of nature and of God, great in itself 
and its own affections, great in its embracing the lives of others ! 
Say that our dream of immortality is but a sort of provisional 
faith, educating and disciplining us for a noble society on earth 
(a doctrine I should lament to be compelled to believe) — say, 
that to ask for the reproduction or recreation of a given man, is 
to ask for the recreation of the whole world of which he was a 
part — say that it is as idle to wish back the dead as to wish back 
the roses of last summer — -you still have this living man before 
you, with all his expanding knowledge and generous affections — 
you still must admit the continuous growth of this Humanity — 
this greatest creation of God, the sum and climax of all else we 
call creation. 

To which progressive growth of Humanity, or the Human 
Society, it is time I should now turn. 



PART II. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

I AM almost alarmed at my undertaking, though entered on 
half sportively. Out of so vast a subject as the Progress of 
Humanity to take up a compact, succinct, and manageable por- 
tion, is a nicer task, I fear, than I can accomplish. It seems an 
easy thing to fill a goblet from the ocean ; there is water enough, 
and wave after wave comes bounding to your feet with an over- 
whelming prodigality. But take your glass down to the beach 
and try. The chance is, you have the water all over and about 
you, and very little in your goblet. Yet some such experiment 
I must now make. 

A few preliminaries must be first settled. Am I to predict 
one destiny for all mankind ? or am I to limit my anticipations 
to the more advanced nations of the civihzed world ? Or on 
what high pinnacle of observation am I, in imagination, to perch 
myself, in order to survey impartially the great stream of time ? 

Section I. — Preliminaries. 

That which at first sight seems a somewhat narrow and lim- 
ited method of proceeding, is nevertheless, I believe, the safest 
and the most philosophical. I, an Englishman, take my stand 
in England, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, a. d. 
1850, and from this position I look backwards and forwards 
from the past to the future, and around upon the rest of the 
nations. 

I do not decide that England is the foremost country in the, 
world ; I may safely assert that she is in the foremost rank. It 
would be difficult to prove that any other country exhibits the 
elements of progress more distinctly. I, at all events, know 



452 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

England better than any other nation, and can speak more con- 
fidently of the new phases of thought appearing there amongst 
mankind. Nor am I precluded from casting my eyes from time 
to time on our great European contemporaries ; — nation reflects 
light upon nation. A speculative Frenchman would take his 
station in France, a German in Germany, an American in the 
United States. I do not even decide that England will always 
maintain her place in the foremost rank of nations ; others may 
pass her in the race ; she may suffer a reverse in fortune, such 
as the great nations of antiquity. Something may be wrought 
out — some great step may be first taken here in England, and 
yet the further development of human society into its com- 
plete type may be carried on in other and distant parts of the 
world. 

It is not my business to advance a whole world at once. 
Progress has always been both partial and intermittent. One 
nation makes great advances, whilst others are stationary, and, 
after this energetic period, becomes itself perhaps stationary, 
or retrograde. Other nations have taken up the work — not 
precisely where it was dropt — they have generally been pro- 
ceeding on some pathway of their own — but they have received 
new impulse, aid, and direction from the more advanced people. 
In the ancient world, nation after nation is seen rising into emi- 
nence, throwing the light of its great example over many other 
people still sitting in darkness ; then itself sinking into obscurity, 
or disappearing from the scene. Egypt, before descending to 
the enormous tomb she had reared for herself, transmits the 
torch to the youthful hand of Greece ; and Greece, the marvel- 
lous, is seen to accomplish more for the life of all other nations 
than she even accomplished for her own. Athens and Jeru- 
salem — how few their palmy days ! — how long their reign over 
the minds of men ! 

I hold it amongst the weakest of all modes of argument to 

take us to the ruins of ancient cities, and bid us sit down there 

, and contemplate them in despondency. It is from the history 

/'* of a world, not from the history of a nation, that we have to 

predict the future of a world. Progress belongs to Humanity, 

not to Rome or Greece. A certain type of social existence is 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 453 

developed; then a higher type is subsequently developed. It 
matters not whether this is done within the same city, or the 
same neighbourhood, or in remote parts of the world. The 
progress which Humanity has made is equally clear. The ruins 
of an ancient city may be compared to the fossil remains we 
exhume from the earth ; they are no proof of an expiring 
vitality, but of a vitality that has been putting on new forms. 
Nature could not grow that shell into any higher type ; she left 
it, and grew another. I take the ruins to be a proof of the pro- 
gressive development of human life. Men had built well, but 
yet imperfectly ; there was something wrong at the foundation, 
something wrong in the plan ; they must begin elsewhere on a 
new plan. That broken shell is left standing there as a record 
of the past. 

It is not my business to advance a whole world at once. 
Seckendorf would sometimes throw at my head vast hordes of 
Tartars, Calmucks, Malays, Hottentots — I know not what — and 
tell me to humanize and cultivate them, and gather them into 
refined communities animated by a love of the public good. Let 
them first approach those forms of civilization which we have 
already, and long ago, realized. I do not propose yet unreal- 
ized types for them. At other times he would remind me of the 
difference of climate. It is here too cold, it is there too hot. 
As well attempt to civilize the wild bear of the polar sea, as 
those who have to pass the winter with him. Be it so. Per- 
haps the human family may one day call off its vagrant children 
from such unpropitious localities as the polar ice, or the torrid 
desert. 

I am told of Arabian tribes who, in their simple way of living 
and thinking, have presented, generation after generation, as 
unchanged an aspect as the skies above, or the desert around 
them. Yes, and it was in the desert around them that the immo- 
bility lay. Note how the inherent vigour of these Arabs springs 
forth at the preaching of a Mahomet. " After the race had 
lived," says the author of Cosmos, "for thousands of years almost 
without contact with the rest of the world, and leading for the 
most part a nomadic life, they suddenly broke forth, became pol- 
ished and refined by mental contact with the inhabitants of the 



454 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

ancient seats of civilization — subdued, proselytized, and ruled 
over nations from the Pillars of Hercules to the Indus." 

Such were the men. The desert still reclaims its own, and 
the existing Arab of the present day may be very much what 
his predecessor was a thousand years ago. 

Of climates, it may be observed, that some favour repose more 
than activity; and in such climates men are capable of strong 
passions and great efforts, but there is not that steady and endur- 
ing industry which raises a whole people into a prosperous con- 
dition. Successful wars, or an able despot, produce a temporary 
excitement, and vast works are accomplished. But when the 
great king dies, and government falls into the hands of men 
devoted only to pleasure, it is seen that no sterling or genuine 
progress has been made by the general body of the people. The 
great pageantries of war, and state, and perhaps of religion, hid 
the universal poverty and ignorance. This consideration may 
serve to explain to us the fact, that of the people whom we call 
savages some appear to have retained, in their language or cus- 
toms, traces of a more advanced state of civilization than that in 
which they have been found by us. 

But the world is one, and all the climates of the world are 
subservient to one humanity. Arts and inventions which spring 
into existence in a temperate zone, will not be kept within any 
such boundary. The intercommunion of nation with nation is 
indeed one of the indispensable conditions of the progress of 
mankind. When I am reminded that even an industrious people 
like the Chinese have manifested for ages very little advance- 
ment, I must reply that, if this is the case — for we know too 
little of the Chinese to speak of them with confidence — I can 
only view it as a very striking proof that an intercommunication 
or rivalry of nation with nation, polity with polity, is one great 
means of progress. And such intercommunication will come. 
" How oppressive to the imagination," says one, " is the eternal 
immobility of the Hindoo ! " And the words are hardly out of 
his mouth when this immobility begins to move. My fellow- 
subject the Hindoo (become sucli, I am afraid, by no will of his 
own) still thinks, it seems, that the river Ganges is a god — some- 
how or other, river and god at once — he still clings to his castes 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 455 

and his institutions of Menu — lie would not dine for all the 
world at the table of the Governor-general of India. A Soudra, 
I am told, may be a prince, and a Brahmin may cook his dinner, 
but the Brahmin cook must not eat with the Soudra Prince for 
whom he has been cooking. They die very hard — these relig- 
ious customs — but die they do. My fellow -subject the Hindoo 
underwent the other day a very creditable examination in physi- 
ology. If many Hindoos study physiology the Ganges will flow 
within its banks, a very noble river, but no god at all : there will 
be more of the god in the human body that has still life enough 
to bend over the stream. My fellow-subject the Hindoo will 
have railroads running through his rice plantations, and may be 
very happy by-and-by to eat what he can, without inquiry who 
eats with him, in a five minutes' scramble at a railway station. 

"Whether we continue to hold India, or whether it break from 
our grasp — as one day it surely must — we shall have proved its 
benefactors. A war of independence would be the greatest 
boon we could infiici upon it. This would excite a nationality 
and patriotism, which, amongst other good offices, would infuse a 
new spirit into their effete religion ; at present, it seems, either a 
mere abstraction of philosophy, or the most puerile and cumbrous 
of ceremonials. 

Seckendorf would at one moment throw in my way the diver- 
sity of race, and the next moment remove the obstacle himself. 
He would cynically observe that the stronger animal, like the 
stronger plant, Avill take possession of the soil. The red man 
dwindles away before the white, and leaves to the stronger, and 
the wiser, the earth he could make so little use of. 

There may be diversities of race, but it has never yet been 
proved of any people that it was incapable of progress. Of no 
people can you say more than this, that at present it is lower 
than others in the scale of knowledge and power : you cannot 
deny that it is caj^able of culture ; you cannot deny that culture 
reacts upon that yqyj nervous or cerebral organization in which 
the difference of race is supposed to consist ; you cannot there- 
fore assert of the descendants of any existing race that they will 
be incapable of attaining to whatever grade of excellence other 
human beings may attain. EveiT people of whom we know 



456 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

any thing has evidently made some progress ; so that the very 
utmost you can say of any given race is, that progress is slower 
with them than with others ; you cannot possibly draw a line 
or boundary — thus far and no farther — in the case of any one 
people. 

The only question of any interest for us to decide is, the 
nature and degree of diversity between the several populations 
of the earth. This diversity is not made greater than it fs by 
assigning to these populations an independent origin ; nor can it 
militate with our sentiments of universal fellowship to believe 
that this human species was brought into existence in different 
parts of the earth, with such constitutional varieties as adapted 
each race at once to the climate it inhabited. It has been re- 
marked that the mingling of races has led to an improvement in 
the physical constitution of men, and as this commingling of 
races has gone on very extensively, and is still going on, we 
shall at all events be entitled in time to speak of mankind being 
essentially one race, and one great family. 

I am glad, for my own part, to find that this question, of the 
manner in which the world was peopled by man, has no impor- 
tant bearing on my subject, for it is one on which I have felt it 
difficult to come to a decision. Speaking of life in general, 
vegetable and animal, there is nothing which our botanists and 
zoologists have more distinctly made out than this — that there is 
no central point on our globe from which vegetable and animal 
life can be supposed to have radiated — but different districts, 
marked out with more or less distinctness, have had their own 
Flora and Fauna. Life, like the light from the sun, with which 
it is so intimately connected, has visited impartially all quarters 
of the globe. It will not do to say that, wherever the requisite 
conditions for life are found, there fife is found ; because if by 
requisite conditions Ave mean the conditions to support an animal, 
then wherever grass is growing under temperate skies we might 
expect to see a horse grazing ; and if we mean the conditions 
for the formative growth and production of an animal, then the 
answer is, that such conditions are not known. But though our 
knowledge does not permit us to make this wide generalization, 
no fact is better established than this general and independent 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 457 

origination of life. No one draws all the animals of Africa, and 
America, and Australia, out of Asia. 

But man, it is said, is an exception to the rule, and for a very 
plain reason. Other animals could not emigrate, as man does, 
from one region to the other, and man is endowed with a capa- 
bility of adapting himself to different climates. The Indian 
elephant could never have traversed the desert, or made its way 
to Africa; it was necessary that there should be an African 
elephant also. The Asiatic tiger or leopard could never have 
crossed the Atlantic, or got round by the north pole into South 
America, and it was necessary that the jaguar should appear in 
that continent. It is otherwise with man. Put him down in 
any one spot upon the globe, he, or his descendants, could find 
their way, by land or water, sooner or later, to every portion of 
it. To him also has been given a constitution capable of bear- 
ing every diversity of climate. 

This ability to accommodate himself to different climates is 
not denied, but is it of such a nature as to render quite super- 
fluous the hypothesis of originally different races ? And are the 
constitutional varieties now present on the surface of the earth 
such as we can account for by any process of acclimating we are 
acquainted with ? The physiologist gives us two classes of facts, 
which lead to opposite conclusions. He appeals to the constancy 
of nature in perpetuating the same types, and shows us points 
of difference, say between the black African and the Hindoo, 
which are strictly hereditary. On the other hand, he shows us 
that this constancy of nature is liable to be interrupted ; that the 
type may be modified, in certain unessential particulars, by the 
slow action of climate, food, &c. ; and that these modifications 
become, in their turn, hereditary. To which class of facts are 
we here to attribute the greatest weight ? 

One observation I will hazard. When I am referred to the 
unhealthy influence of certain "hot and swampy districts" of 
Africa as a cause of the blackness of the negro, or as mainly 
concerned in the process of acclimating the white man — as if 
the adaptation to the climate was obtained through disease and 
physical degradation — I must demur. It was surely the healthy 
Asiatic peopling the more healthy parts of Africa, who first 

20 



458 THE DEVELOPxMENT OF SOCIETY. 

underwent those modifications which ended in a perfect adapta- 
tion to the cHmate. It is surely not disease that lays the founda- 
tion for the finest specimens of physical power that the sun looks 
down upon. On the coast of Africa, the black man, tall, well- 
formed, in full health and vigour, braves a heat that strikes the 
European into hopeless lassitude. I do not say that his ancestor 
was not a white man, who came from Asia, and that an adapta- 
tion to the climate may not have been gradually brought about, 
but the process could hardly be that to >vhich we give the name 
of disease. 

It unfortunately happens, in this controversy, that every array 
of facts can be accounted for on either hypothesis. The grada- 
tion of races, the intermediate peoples you may interpose between 
any two extremes, may be explained either by supposing one 
race undergoing changes as it gradually spread over the surface 
of the earth, or by the intercommunication of different races, 
meeting and blending with each other. So the degree of simi- 
larity which philologists think they have traced between all the 
languages of the world, may, in the estimation of some, point to 
a common origin for all the inhabitants of the world. To others 
it may appear that such similarity as the philologist is able to 
trace, may easily be explained by the simple fact that all man- 
kind have similar organs of speech, similar organs of hearing, 
similar wants, and similar faculties of mind. The antiquarian, 
or the historian, can help us least of all. The earth is every- 
where peopled before an authentic note of history is heard. 
Tradition only speaks of the shifting and changing, the rolling 
here or there, of the great seas of human population. What 
carries us back fiirther than this, comes manifestly from the harp 
of the poet, or it is the early speculation of philosophy uttering 
itself in the language of the myth. 

Varieties there doubtless are amongst the inhabitants of the 
world ; but these inhabitants themselves are constantly changing 
and intermixing. No man can point to any spot on earth, and 
say this spot shall be always inhabited by barbarians. It is very 
possible, too, that a people, whether from a difference in race or 
influence of climate, may be unable to originate what yet they 
may be able to learn, or to imitate. The science of Europe may 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 459 

be taught throughout Asia, though it might never have been 
produced there. And who knows but that, when the problem of 
a powerful, rational, equitable society, shall have been worked 
out in these temperate zones — so favourable to strenuous and 
persevering endeavour — who knows but that the bright example 
may be seized upon by many a nation in the East, amongst 
whom it may even extend with the rapidity of a new religion ? 
The Asiatic, appropriating the science won by our severer 
labours, and such of our arts and inventions as may be service- 
able in his more lenient climate, will carry them off as lawful 
spoil and unenvied pillage, to his own more favoured soil and 
more delicious skies. There, in the brightest regions of the 
earth, he may exhibit the most perfect, as he exhibited the 
earliest, of the forms of civilized and social existence. 

Humanity, after all, is one. And just as any people advances 
by one individual rising above his compeers (for which outgrowth 
of the individual you can look to no other cause than the same 
creative and beneficent Power to which all individuals owe their 
existence and their growth,) so all mankind advances by a like 
preeminence amongst this or that people. We, then, planting 
ourselves in England, and in the nineteenth century, endeavour 
to look back on the great stream of history, and forward, so far 
as any indications of the future can be detected by us. 

" Every thing that exists depends on the past, prepares the 
future, and is related to the whole." Each age, in its place in 
the succession, has had a certain perfection or unity of its own, 
but has been also a preparation for its successor. Something of 
this I may be able even in this brief sketch to indicate, as I rap- 
idly trace the progress of mankind — in the arts which administer 
to the comfort of life, in science, in morality, in religion ; or say, 
in industrial prosperity, in laws and government, in speculative 
knowledge. 

Section II. — Ancient Civilization. 

It would be useless to inquire how men lived in that long period 
which probably elapsed before written language was invented, 
and of which no record has been transmitted to us. The first 
records themselves strangely enough present us with gods, and 



460 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

demigods, and giants, instead of men ; and fables of the imagi- 
nation instead of real events. Men exercised their imagination 
first, before they tasked their memory. The commencements of 
every people are shrouded in mystery or fantastic fable. Not un- 
wisely. It was well that men should respect themselves, and 
there was perhaps a time when the tapestry hung up by the 
imagination at one end of the vista, was a better subject of con- 
templation than the bare and unsightly truth. Whatever the 
commencements of the race have been, they will be ennobled, 
and perhaps explained, by the future. When the whole pro- 
gramme of humanity shall be unfolded, every part of it will be seen 
to be fit, and in its fit place. Already we can afford to tear down 
the tapestry, though instead of gods and heroes, and a golden age, 
and a garden of innocence, a most rude and primitive people 
should be dimly seen, half hidden by the interminable forests 
amongst which they ensnare or pursue their prey. 

Some speculative writers have done their best to fill up this 
vacant space in our annals, by describing the progress of man- 
kind from the wild hunter to the less wild shepherd, and from 
the shepherd to the settled agriculturist. Yet, as the climates of 
the earth are various, and offer at once various kinds of food, it is 
more probable that these important differences in the method of 
obtaining subsistence (which lead to so many other differences in 
life) were developed, not successively in any stationary popula- 
tion, but according to the localities men occupied. The earth, 
the common mother of us all, would educate her children, as soon 
as they extended their area of population, into various arts and 
methods of obtaining food. And we may note here, that the dif- 
ference in climate and produce of the several lands and shores of 
our terraqueous globe, thus variously educating the several por- 
tions of the human race, would fit them at once for that important 
office already hinted at, of stimulating or assisting each other in 
the career of progress. 

When some writers have suggested that no nation ever civil- 
ized itself, and have therefore represented civilization as coeval 
with the race of man, they have overlooked the fact of the early 
difference established between the several tribes or nations of the 
earth, and of the assistance they would render to each other. 



- THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 461 

What assistance, you will say, can the less civilized and less 
instructed afford to the more instructed, who often convert the 
former into their mere slaves ? I answer, that this very conver- 
sion of them into slaves was a very marvellous assistance, as I 
shall have occasion by-and-by more fully to explain. 

When the curtain draws up, and we really catch some glimpse 
of the world as it was in olden times, what is the spectacle pre- 
sented to us ? The scene opens on us with great cities already 
built, in Egypt and in Asia, Thebes and Memphis, Nineveh and 
Babylon, with wide outlying regions occupied by less settled and 
pastoral people — pastoral not therefore peaceful — with some of 
whom these imperial cities are making war, to oth^irs offering 
commerce. 

I suppose I may consider it undisputed that the civilization of 
these and other great cities of antiquity — even those of Greece 
and Italy — has been surpassed by that of the present capitals of 
Europe. But if any one should be doubtful or captious on this 
head, I should beg him to reflect on these two elements of the 
ancient civilization, — 1. Amongst social institutions, Slavery; 
2. In religious worship. Sacrifice. These two institutions or cus- 
toms, on which we are now able to look back, are sufficient of 
themselves to establish the fact of human progress within the 
historical period. 

It is true that both Slavery and Sacrifice, under various modi- 
fications and various interpretations, have survived to periods of 
civilization which, in many respects, might bear comparison with 
our own. But their nature and origin are undisguisable. They 
bear the indelible stamp — the one of having originated in an 
era of violence, when sheer Force was in the ascendant — the 
other in a period of dark ignorance, when either a very savage, 
or a very childish, imagination predominated in religion. 

Slavery, in the great cities I am speaking of, arose out of war ; 
and war again was carried on with the object of enslaving other 
people. Men* were captured, bound, dragged in, and compelled 
to labour for the victors ; the women and children had perhaps 
been put to death. What aspect slavery may have borne in patri- 
archal tents, or in some pastoral communities, is another matter ; 
it might here have been nothing else than that hiring for life, 



462 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

which would have been the only equitable, and perhaps the only 
possible contract for labour at a period when commerce had not 
yet introduced the use of money. But in the great cities of an- 
tiquity we have indisputable proof of its origin in war, and that 
the captive was converted into the slave. 

The rite of Sacrifice tells its strange tale with the same distinct- 
ness. Many were the subtle interpretations and doctrines con- 
nected with it in later times ; but the imagination that could have 
given rise to the slaughter of the ox or the lamb, as a mode of 
worship and propitiation of the god, transfers us at once to w^hat 
we should call the infancy of the human intellect, if the infancy 
were not of so terribly passionate a character. For it was not 
the ox or the lamb only that was slain : in the earliest periods of 
which we have historical record, human sacrifices extensively pre- 
vailed. And this points very plainly to an imagination exercised 
under the dominant influence of the passions of war. That the god 
was held to be pleased with the slaughter of men and of beasts — 
that the pouring out of blood propitiated him — that the voluntary 
infliction of suffering was an acceptable mode of testifying their 
devotion — that such ideas prevailed, is indisputable. Men who 
desired nothing so fervently as the destruction of their enemies, 
and to whom no sight was so acceptable, imagined that the god 
who was to give victory in battle, would be himself pleased with 
destruction, and they were willing to offer it to him in any shape 
that might be supposed to secure his assistance. I consider this 
early, most prevalent, and most passionate form of religion to be 
deserving of especial study, and shall return to it again. 

I do not pretend to decide whether men commenced with 
simple and innocent offerings to the god, and then rose in 
their bidding for his favour, till they sacrificed human life ; or 
whether they commenced with this horrible rite, and substituted 
animals and other offerings as they became more peaceful and 
more humanized. The custom of making offerings to some 
supernatural power seems invariably to accompany a certain 
ignorant and unreflective state of society. Travellers tell us 
of simple savages who offer meat to their idols — put it to their 
mouths — witli exactly the same unreflective imagination that 
prompts a child to put the cake it is eating to the mouth of its 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 468 

doll. What served as food to man, was given to the god, with 
some vague feeling that it would be food to him also. And the 
custom, once established, would perpetuate itself by the belief 
which is sure to follow on any religious custom, that the god 
would be angry if the accustomed service were not rendered. 
The most respectable origin that can be assigned to the rite is, 
that as men approached any human being, any prince or gov- 
ernor whom they wished to propitiate, with some gift or tribute, 
they approached their supernatural ruler also, bearing in their 
hands whatever gift they could. They would worship their 
god as they did their prince. And indeed, to an ignorant people 
governed by a despot, prince and god are very much alike. 
The prince is half a god, and their god was perhaps once 
an earthly monarch before he ascended or returned to the 
skies. 

A feeling, too, which may demand some respect from us, 
mingled with the most painful and odious rites of sacrifice. 
When we can do no service to a being greatly superior to 
ourselves, we can at least show our devotion, and prove our 
will to serve, by doing some disservice to ourselves. We can 
wound, and cut, and mangle our own bodies — we can destroy 
our most valued possessions — we can destroy our cattle and 
our slaves. The penance was, doubtless, adopted as a means of 
proving our devotion to the god, long before it was employed 
as a moral discipline for the man himself; and we may remark 
in passing, that it still has a certain merit attached to it, in the 
eyes of the common people, quite distinct from any moral 
purpose it may answer. Even with regard to the terrible rite 
of human sacrifice, it ought not to be forgotten that, when men 
have sacrificed themselves, or their own children, in any period 
of public calamity, or to earn the favour of the god on any 
public emergency — this may have been as great and noble an act 
of heroism as any that history has to record. In whatever 
terms you would describe the conception formed of the divine 
Power who could be so worshipped, jou cannot but admire the 
worshipper. He who performed the sacrifice was truly great. 
You would say, from your own intellectual position, that there 
was a certain divine idea growing up in the many though it 



464 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

appeared as yet in his own act of worship, and not in his con- 
ception of the deity. 

Acts of heroism, however, which grow out of a certain rite 
or custom, no more explain the spirit in which that custom 
originated, than subtle interpretations, afterwards invented by 
speculative minds, show the mode of thinking that presided over 
its institution. But I must not be tempted to pursue this sub- 
ject any further at present. 

Section III. — Progress of Industry and of Industrial 
Organization — Era of Slavery. 

In ancient civilization Slavery was everywhere present. It 
is an institution we now justly hold in abhorrence, and we con- 
gratulate ourselves on our escape from it ; but an institution 
once so general had, we may be sure, its legitimate place in the 
development of human society. We must not simply recoil 
before a fact of this description, but must endeavour to com- 
prehend its full significance. 

Unless one man had possessed the power to coerce many 
others to work for him, in order to please his tastes and desires, 
there would have been no industry but of that kind which each 
man practised for his own wants and those of his family. These 
being satisfied according to some rude standard. Industry would 
have remained stationary. The simplest arts only would have 
been practised, and probably in the rudest manner. To per- 
ceive this, we have only to ask ourselves. For whose benefit 
would any of those arts have been first practised or attempted, 
wherein the efforts of several men are required for the produc- 
tion of that which only one can possess or enjoy ? 

Take the tent, or the habitation, for instance. You wish 
to pass beyond that rude stage of the art of building in which 
each family builds for itself, builds some structure that just 
suffices for shelter — you wish to pass from the hut to the house. 
Now, it is evident that it would require the labour of many men 
to build one much larger and superior house than those which 
each man had contrived to raise for himself. The task would 
never be entered on — the wish could never arise — the requisite 
combination of labour would never have been brought about — 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 465 

unless one man had been in the condition to compel others to 
work for him. Tliat combination of the labour of many for a 
common purpose — which is so much extolled by the political 
economist under the name of " division of labour " — was first 
brought about by the power of one man over others ; in short, 
by Slavery. And that important office of the " capitalist," the 
supplying food to a labourer occupied about other work than 
the procuring of food for himself, was first performed by the 
owner of many slaves, and the proprietor of the corn for which 
he neither ploughed nor sowed. It was the power of a despotic 
master which united multitudes in a common labour. It was 
the wish or the caprice of such a master that raised the stand- 
ard of production in any art. If the object to be constructed is 
of a complicate character — as a house or a palace — this would 
necessarily lead to that division of labour wherein each one 
limits himself to some specific part of a general task. It is the 
slave-owner who has the key of the granary, and he necessarily 
is the first capitalist ; but he sustains the part very imperfectly, 
since he employs his capital only for himself. 

The reason why we find that an agricultural population takes 
so great a stride in advance of one that lives by the chase, is, 
that those who possess and cultivate land can have slaves who 
cultivate it for them. The owners of such land can gather 
themselves together, for common defence, in fortified places. 
The city can originate amongst them. Men subsisting by the 
chase could not have slaves ; for unless the master supported 
his own slave, he must give him a degree of personal liberty 
altogether incompatible with a state of servitude. And accord- 
ingly we find that, amidst such people, the arts, after obtaining 
a certain point, rest stationary. Some practice of barter and 
exchange may lead to so much " division of labour," that one 
man may make bows and arrows, and another go to the chase 
with them, repaying the maker of the bow with a portion of 
the produce of his chase. But no design could be entered on for 
the production, by many, of what only one or a few can enjoy 
— as a large house,, elaborate furniture, splendid trappings, 
armour, and the like. Only a despotic power can effect this. 
A subsequent era qf society will reap all the benefit of tiie 
2Q* 



466 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

labour and ingenuity which was in the first instance forced into 
existence by an arbitrary will, and the very arts thus rudely 
fostered will aid in producing a better organization of society. 
It is thus one era prepares for the next. 

I said that slavery does not exist at all amongst our savages 
of the chase ; but there is a certain domestic slavery one finds 
even amongst them. One whole sex seems to be made the slave 
of the other. The first use which the stronger sex makes of its 
strength, is not assuredly to help the weaker, but to make the 
weaker sex work for it. Domestic as well as social order 
seems, in the first instance, to be obtained by mere Force exact- 
ing obedience. Whether the union of the Family requires, at 
its first institution, this harsh discipline, I cannot say — one does 
not like to think it; but, except some superstition has early 
intervened, the savage woman is generally seen to be the slave 
of the savage man. She carries the burden, cooks the meal, 
and retires while the man eats it. This last trait marks the 
harsh nature of the bond ; for, of course, she must take her share 
of the necessary labours, and it would be difficult enough to 
define what that equitable share would be. There is a stage 
when the conjugal union is little better than a mere slavery. 
The man has to keep his wife as an exclusive possession. This 
is something gained to society ; only he holds her with too rude 
a grasp. 

In the ancient civilization we are speaking of, the whole soci- 
ety seems organized — in its domestic, industrial, and political rela- 
tions — by mere Force. It is a slavery everywhere — in the house, 
in the workshop, in the palace. But great things w^ere done under 
this first organization of society. On the banks of the Nile, whose 
periodical overflow occasions so singular a fertility, population 
thickens — power grows with numbers — a city is built — wars of 
conquest are undertaken — the enslaved population of outlying 
districts are brought in and compelled to work. The boldest 
imagination sets them at their task. They raise pyramids, pal- 
aces, temples, and fill them with curious works of art. These 
men — who, if they had been labouring for themselves, w^ould 
have been impelled each by his own petty want — have become 
the servants of this great magician — the imaginative faculty of 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 467 

On the banks of the Nile, or in the plains of Asia, the labour 
of multitudes was tasked for the service of lordly masters — ^but 
of lordly masters who themselves lent their ear to the sugges- 
tion of the man of thought, the man of genius — of him who 
could devise a new thing, and foresee new possibilities. In this 
way the spirit of Thought was moving and moulding. Barbaric 
splendours arose, and also many useful productions, whether of 
the loom or the forge, which have since been repeated and multi- 
plied for the advantage and enjoyment of numbers. When we 
look back to the palace of some Pharaoh, or some great Satrap, 
we see the invention and industry of a whole multitude set at 
work to exhibit to the world one great model of art, enjoyment, 
beauty, luxury — afterwards to be copied piecemeal, or on a 
diminished scale, for thousands. I doubt not that the useful and 
elegant articles of furniture which now so agreeably adorn the 
residences of free and equal citizens, may be legitimately traced 
to the power of some Satrap dreaming of nothing but his solitary 
magnificence — to him and to that unk-nown man of genius who 
was called in to help him dream. Nor am I aware that we ought 
to feel much commiseration for the crowd of enslaved labourers. 
They, as the world then stood, lost very little when they lost their 
freedom, and they gained something in their habits of industry, 
even though these at first were enforced on them. And note 
this always — that a Hfe made up of few elements, or few enjoy- 
ments, may seem to us a sad one to descend into, but is not on 
account of its mere simplicity an unhappy life. The earlier 
generations of mankind, like the ruder classes of our own time, 
may have had, for the most part, a very limited existence, but 
not therefore a miserable one. 

The more we think of it, the more clearly will it come out to 
us, that the great governments and polities of antiquity were due 
to this relationship of slavery ; so far due to it, that other and 
cooperating causes would have been ineffective without it. 

It is commonly said that the first wide Despotism arose out 
of war — out of conquest. The commander and victor in battle 
retained his authority in peace. But what enabled him to retain 
authority over soldiers as brave as himself — to perpetuate the 
authority of the camp in the city — and not only to perpetuate it 



468 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

in his own person, but to transmit it to his son ? This — that 
there was a domestic tyranny in each man's house, which bound 
the lord of it to uphold that existing rule, whatever it might be, 
which retained the whole community together. Every owner of 
a slave was himself a despot ; and if despotism or a military 
rule was established, he would support his own power by sup- 
porting that of the great national despot. At a subsequent era 
these lords might combine and form an aristocracy. A monarchy 
of limited extent seems naturally to resolve itself into an aristoc- 
racy. An extensive despotism, where combination amongst the 
chiefs is extremely difficult, supports itself by its own magnitude. 

Property in land and cattle, it is often said, will of itself intro- 
duce some measure of law and government. Very true ; but, 
though it seems a harsh thing to say, it was property in man 
which first introduced settled stationary governments, and led to 
the great city. The possession of land alone is not always found 
to settle and fix a population. Agricultural tribes, who have no 
slaves to till the soil for them, are apt to be as nomadic as pas- 
toral tribes. A peculiar spot like that of the banks of the Nile, 
not only fertile in itself, but surrounded by a desert which makes 
their " happy valley " precious to its inhabitants, may detain its 
population. But even then, without the institution of slavery, it 
would always have remained a mere village population — each 
family living in its own hut or tent. 

I have no wish to disguise the harsh nature of this relationship 
of master and slave. But it was what the times demanded. 
What we see most prominent in all early periods are the passions 
of war. These, too, have their terrible joy. It was some step 
in advance when the victor spared the captive to convert him to 
a slave. A harsh relationship it must have been under these 
circumstances. No equal rights; labour compelled by the 
scourge ; obedience prompted by force. Yet the relationship 
itself modifies, and its harsh lineaments fade away. If the slave 
is a domestic, some community of feeling and of interest ivill 
rise up between him and the family he serves. If multitudes of 
slaves are herded together, they have a society of their own — 
a society within a society. Nature and habit so contrive it that 
no permanent condition of humanity is without its solace. Harsh 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 469 

enough, however, the relation must still appear to us. But it is 
indispensable that we note the important part it has performed 
in the onward progress of society. 

A single tyrant compels thousands to work for him — to build 
a palace, or it may be to build a tomb for him — and he gives them 
a rag and an onion a-piece. What seems more monstrous than 
that these half-naked creatures, who have so much to procure for 
themselves, should be toiling at an immense pyramid for the dead 
carcass of a man. But the natural order of events is often pre- 
cisely that which, at the first blush, we pronounce to be most 
unnatural; for we think — very mistakenly — that what is most 
rational would be first chosen. This most rational thing is just 
what we have, through many curious paths, to get at. The great 
pyramid of Egypt presents no very rational or very amiable 
object to a reflective man. It stands there a most egregious 
egotism ; at the best, a sublime folly ; an eternal mountain of 
stone, and this absurd mummy at the core of it. Nevertheless, 
the knowledge and skill were, doubtless, very great which this 
monstrous symbol of egotism was the means of eliciting. Let it 
stand there for ever in the desert as a monument of a great era 
in the progress of mankind. 

Throughout all this ancient civilization, note one thing : The 
Judge and the Moralist, Law and Public Opinion, all decree in 
favour of this right of property of man in man. Men become 
enlightened jurists and profound philosophers, and reason much 
of the public good — and Religion puts on her high moral aspect, 
and enforces the most equitable and philanthropic maxims of 
conduct ; but all these generalizations of law, morality, and 
religion circle harmless around this institution of slavery — em- 
brace it, or do not oppose it. The public good requires it, or did 
require ; its necessity is still believed in. It is written down as 
with an iron pen in the table of the law, that man has an undis- 
puted right to his slave. 

Section TV. — Era of Wages. 

I advance at one bound from the Past to the Present, from 
the era of slavery to what, so far as the organization of industry 
is concerned, may be called the era of wages. 



470 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

The Many must work for the Few before the Many can work 
for the Many. And this working for the Few is brought about, 
in the first instance by compulsion — by slavery — which, again, 
is the result of war — the combination of armed men giving to 
few the power over many. 

It may appear to us that the harsh system of slavery lasted 
much longer than was necessary, but its necessity, as a prior 
condition to the system that followed, cannot be denied. And 
what system is it that dies out just when we think it might be 
dispensed with ? How could it be a system, and have all the 
permanence and stability of custom and habit, and not also 
manifest this inconvenient and obstinate vitality ? He who 
has reflected on what we owe to custom and habit, will not be 
very impatient when he observes them still perpetuating what 
in reason we think had reached its legitimate period of dissolu- 
tion. 

It was only in the city already built and peopled — it was only 
in the already organized community, that the new relationship 
of employer and employed, of capitalist and workman, destined 
to substitute that of master and slave, could spring up. It 
would be needless for me to describe what has been narrated 
by many others, the manner in which free and paid labour was 
substituted for compulsory labour. Speaking generally, one 
may say that there grows up in the great city (as descendants 
of free men and otherwise) a large class who are neither slaves 
nor proprietors of slaves. Of these some apply themselves to 
trade and commerce, and enrich themselves ; others, being poor, 
are willing to enter into their service. Thus the relation of em- 
ployer and employed would gradually arise, and for a long time 
coexist with that of master and slave. It would probably soon 
be found by the enterprising citizen that, even though he could 
purchase slaves, the paid labourer was more profitable than the 
slave. The slave must be bought and fed, and was after all an 
unwilling workman ; it was better economy to buy the labour 
only, and labour of a more voluntary character. The improved 
plan would make its way slowly from the town to the country. 
The owner of land and serfs manumits his serf, and pays wages 
to him as his labourer. He manumits himself at the same time 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 471 

from the responsibility of maintaining his serf. But the change 
of one system for another has never perhaps been effected in the 
case of land without the aid of cooperating causes, such as politi- 
cal revolutions, or that destruction of the Roman empire which 
dispersed the inhabitants of cities into the country, and gave both 
new owners and new labourers to the soil. 

One cannot wonder that the change should be slowly effected 
with regard to land. He who has land and slaves seems to 
throw away his land when he parts with the slaves who cultivate 
it. Only in a settled country, where all the land was pretty well 
appropriated, could he have been sure that the possession of the 
land would have called back, or retained for him, the manumit- 
ted serfs. Besides, till trade and the use of money have pene- 
trated throughout the country, there must be some modification 
of slavery or serfdom. With no money and no shops, how pay 
your labourer in wages ? And to pay him in subsistence, and 
hire him only by the month, would be the w^orst and most cruel 
of systems. A hiring for the whole of life, by subsistence for 
age as well as youth, sickness as well as health, would, in the 
absence of money wages, be the only equitable bargain. 

Mark now how, with the proved possibility and establishment 
of a new system, the moral code of society changes ! Slavery 
has become criminal. The rights of property have been thus 
much abrogated, that property in man is gone. To claim such a 
property is stigmatized as a flagrant wrong ; and society cannot 
go back to its old code. We call this right to personal freedom 
an eternal right, although it is comparatively new to us ; for it 
must be eternal for all time to come. We call it sometimes an 
eternal truth ; and not without reason ; for does it not belong to 
that more perfect type of society which the eternal mind is 
slowly manifesting on the earth ? 

Let us unreservedly and cordially admire what has been ac- 
complished in Europe under this new organization of industry, 
and under what may be described as a new moral code, so far as 
one relation of life is concerned. Security to all of property ! 
Free disposition for each man of his own labour ! This was the 
new charter ; and for chief administrator, the capitalist, who not 
only combines and directs the labours of many, but combines 



472 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

them for the service of all classes of the community. How have 
the industrial arts prospered under this new system ! How have 
all their results been multiplied ! What large numbers enjoy all 
that human labour and ingenuity have produced for the substan- 
tial well-being of a man ! The Despot and the Taskmaster, 
having done their part and lived their time, have retired from 
the scene ; and whatever was effected by arbitrary power, is far 
better accomplished by the persuasive capitalist with cash in 
hand for all means of coercion. In these later times especially, 
the rapid progress of all sciences and all arts is the theme of 
perpetual wonder. I need not add my acclamations ; I will add 
only, that nothing indicates that we have advanced to the limits 
of this species of progress. On the contrary, every man feels it 
to be quite as certain that new discoveries in science, and new 
processes in art, await mankind in the future, as he knows it to 
be impossible to divine what those discoveries and processes 
will be. 

And now if this progress continue — if the multitude of man- 
kind should be able to command by their labour those advantages 
which pass familiarly under the names of comfort, competence, 
civilized condition, and the like, how can I but foresee in this a 
preparation for a still greater approximation, and a more equal 
and permanent relationship, between employer and employed? 
I cannot but foresee in this power of producing for the multitude 
an abundance of all the requisites of a humanized existence — 
combined with the increasing intelligence of that multitude — a 
condition of things in which this great business of " food, clothes, 
and fire" will be conducted in such a manner that want, and the 
great evil of our present state, uncertainty, will be driven out of 
the world. Not that I suppose a time will come when men will 
suddenly say amongst themselves, " Lo ! we have now a produc- 
tive industry which, if wisely and equitably directed, would suf- 
fice to give house, clothing, books, instruction, and the like, to 
all. Let us then reorganize this industry, that it may accomplish 
so desirable a result. Let us set to each one his task, and assign 
to each the conditions of a happy existence." This is wild talk, 
and shows an utter oblivion of the manner in which society pro- 
gresses, and in which all great permanent changes are effected. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 473 

The " desirable result " is already in part accomplished, and the 
part accomplishment will gradually lead to such modifications in 
our customs and relationships of life as will tend to its complete 
accomplishment. 

Meanwhile all our prosperity and well-being, present and 
future, are bound up with fidelity to the existing system — the 
charter we live under — the present rights of property. The 
landlord and the capitalist are as essential to our civilization at 
this moment, as the hand that holds the spade or forges the 
steam-engine. I would assist in making this clear if it were at 
all necessary. For not only do I hold this conviction in com- 
mon with all sober and rational men — in common with those 
who would smile at my hopes of the future as visionary — but on 
account of these very hopes, I perhaps hold the conviction with 
even more earnestness than they do. Every thing depends here 
in England, the future as well as the present, on faithful alle- 
giance to our laws of property. 

Perhaps a few words ft'om a Utopian, in opposition to those 
sophisms or mistaken moralities by which these institutions of 
Landlord and Capitalist are occasionally assailed, may not be 
amiss. 

I cannot imitate the energetic style of the mob orator, but 
the pith and substance of his reasoning might be stated thus. 
After describing the landlord's title as originating in mere force, 
and stigmatizing it as usurpation — forgetful quite that what he 
calls force is nothing else than that spontaneous development of 
society springing from the nature and passions of mankind, with- 
out which he would not have been there to talk about society at 
all — he would probably proceed to say : " I can understand the 
supreme justice that the man who sows shall reap ; and in order 
both to sow and to reap, he must have a property in the land. 
A man and his family have a sacred right to so much of the 
soil as they cultivate and live upon. And if the son succeeds to 
the father, he also is clothed with the same perfect and indis- 
putable right. But that a man should own land, and inherit 
land, and enormous portions of it, which he cannot cultivate, 
which other persons cultivate, giving him large tribute in the 
shape of rent — in this I perceive no justice at all. 



474 THE DEVELOPxMENT OF SOCIETY. 

"Nor," would he continue, "is the inherited wealth of the 
Capitalist to me in the least more equitable. It is to the inven- 
tion of money we owe the capitalist. Money not only enables 
us to reward a man's labour by giving a general claim on the 
labour of others ; it also enables the man who has this claim 
given him, to postpone, at his pleasure, the exercise or assertion 
of it. He can not only postpone his claim to the days of sick- 
ness or of old age, but he can waive it during his whole life, and 
transmit it to his child. The accumulation of such claims in 
the hands of the descendant becomes capital, or may become 
capital if he is disposed to employ it as such. Now, it is quite 
just that A, having wrought strenuously and gained his reward, 
should be able to postpone the enjoyment of that reward to any 
period of his own life ; it is quite just and proper that one use 
he should make of the claim he has on others, should be to edu- 
cate and provide for his family, and place his son in a position 
to labour as he had done before him ; but is it just that that 
son, who himself has done nothing for society, should make a 
quite indefinite demand on the industry of that society ? Because 
A wrought well, in and for his own generation X, is this a 
reason why B should live idle upon the labour of generation Y ? 
By what right can B assert a claim upon the harvests of the 
earth, who neither this year nor last year did any thing, in any 
the most circuitous way, towards their production?" 

The answer is clear. Such is for the good of the whole. 
This man who inherits his father's money (if he is not a spend- 
thrift, but desirous of adding to his wealth) makes his claim 
on the harvest of generation Y, that he may call workmen 
about him and set them upon this or that undertaking. He feeds 
them as they work, and products of all kinds are multiplied, and 
the very industry of the farmer is stimulated to obtain them ; 
and, finally, the granary itself is better filled than ever. This 
"unjust inheritance" proves to be the source of general pros- 
perity to generation Y. 

The capitalist does nothing to produce, at least directly, the 
corn and the meat that feed the labourer ; but he is quite as 
necessary as if he did ; for it is he who combines men together 
for the production of commodities, whether of need or of luxury. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 475 

If indeed men had intelligence enough to form the same com- 
binations, for the same purposes, without his aid, his office might 
be dispensed with. But they have not this intelligence, and 
great must be the training and discipline, and elevation of taste, 
before they could possibly have it. 

You complain of the misdirection of industry — that the work- 
men are not exclusively employed in producing what they them- 
selves want. Why, this is one of the indispensable functions of 
the capitalist — that he employs men in producing something of a 
higher character or description than could be produced for all ; 
than could, at least, in the first instance, be produced for all. 

And as to the Landlord, without him, in some form or other, 
there would never have been any civilization at all, nor any 
products of industry beyond the rudest and quite indispensable. 
To him all refinement is in the first place due. In England, at 
this moment, if it were not for the landlord, the earth itself 
would be utterly defaced; not a tree would be left growing; 
nothing but a miserable patchwork of half-cultivated plots and 
allotments would meet the eye. I need not add that the capital- 
ist, in his character of man of wealth, performs also many of the 
functions of the landlord. 

Some one perhaps says. This seems true, but explain to me 
why there is this contradiction between institutions which are 
to command approbation, and the plainest maxims of justice 
and equity ? He who sows should reap ; and we should share 
alike in what God gives to all. Explain to me this contradic- 
tion. 

I both can and will explain it. The maxims of justice, as 
you call them, and which you adopt as the last general laws 
to which appeal is to be made, are not the ultimate rules of 
morality that you take them for. They have to submit, and to 
be subordinated to, a higher and wider rule. The good of the 
whole is the paramount, all-embracing law, to which appeal is 
always finally to be made. The only unalterable law of morality 
is this, that the good of the w^iole be secured, at every epoch, to 
the utmost power and intelligence of mankind. This maxim, 
that a man should possess the produce of his own labour, or a 
full equivalent to it, admirable maxim as it is, is not final ; it has 



476 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

to submit to a greater law — the good of tlie whole ; it never has 
been applied unrestrictedly in any human society, worthy of the 
name, and never could be so applied. 

All such excellent maxims as express themselves in the terms 
Equality and Fraternity — " Share alike," and " Love each other 
as brothers" — submit, in each age, to different limitations and 
interpretations ; and rights which contravene such maxims are 
still preeminently moral rights, if the good of the great organic 
whole of society require them. 

When alluding, in the last section, to the transition from the 
era of slavery to the era of wages, it will be thought, perhaps, 
that I should have made specific mention of the teaching of 
Christianity as one cause of this transition. I am least of all 
men disposed to underrate the good offices of religion, and hold 
it to be one of the greatest causes of human progress, that the 
most philanthropic maxims of morality have been taught under 
the most solemn sanctions of religion. I readily admit that the 
influence of the Christian priesthood was exerted in favour of 
personal freedom. But Christianity, at its institution, did not 
array itself against slavery; and, what is more, it would have 
been exerting itself uselessly, or mischievously, if it had assailed 
one social system till there was another so far developed as to 
be substituted for it. When it had plainly become possible to 
manumit the slave or the serf, without detriment to society, the 
teachers of Christianity threw the weight of their exhortations 
into the turning scale. But the industrial problem had first to 
be solved. 

In some of the United States of Christian America slavery 
exists to this day. And why ? Precisely because the cultiva- 
tion of the soil in those states is thought to require it. And as 
long as this conviction lasts, it is evident that the teaching of 
Christianity will have no effect. The industrial problem must 
first be solved, or some way seen to its solution. For my part, 
I can have no doubt that this hlack serf also will be soon manu- 
mitted ; and it is the prevailing belief that t'he experiment might 
be safely made, that emboldens the Americans of other states to 
denounce the system of negro slavery. 

It is possible, in like manner, that there are points of view in 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 477 

which the present rights of property, and the present relations 
between employer and employed, do not coincide with the phi- 
lanthropic maxims of morality embodied in Christianity. Yet 
no enlightened moralist or Christian divine assails those rights 
or those relations. If, indeed, there is some other industrial 
problem destined to present itself in its turn before us, and if 
this problem should approach its manifest solution, then the 
moralist or the divine would wisely extend the application of 
his benevolent principles ; he might then call for change where 
he had hitherto preached nothing but resignation. But to assail 
laws that are still essential to the well-being of the whole society, 
would not be morality or religion ; it would be as palpable a 
blunder in ethics, as it would be calamitous in its results. 

Section V. — Era of Partnership ; or, some Considerations on 
the Effect likely to be produced hy Increased Abundance and 
Increased Intelligence. — The good of some social whole, not the 
Principle of Equality, our true Moral Guidance. 

I must candidly acknowledge that if this Oonfessio Fidei had 
been written two years ago, I should here have introduced a 
somewhat long chapter on that Era of Partnership into which 
I think that our present era of wages will gradually rise ; the 
relationship of employer and employed merging into the happier 
relationship of partnership between labour and capital, or be- 
tween labour and labour, in some industrial association. But 
every year I live makes me more indisposed to indulge in any 
speculation that may be construed into a prediction of the pre- 
cise nature of the customs or modes of living of a future genera- 
tion. I shall limit myself, therefore, to some indications which 
lie open to us all, and which are matters of observation rather 
than of speculation ; or to the discussion of those general prin- 
ciples, the truth of which cannot be affected by any change we 
can contemplate in human life. 

Men, I have said, combined their labour first under the com- 
pulsion of the Taskmaster, afterwards under the tutelage of the 
Capitahst; they will come at length to combine voluntarily, 
with foresight and full consciousness of the ends to be obtained 
by combination. The two previous stages may be considered as 



478 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

necessary steps, necessary education for this last stage ; which, 
indeed, will require a high education, in moral training as well 
as industrial power. Do you regret this ? Do you regret that 
a secure material prosperity to all men will only be the result 
of, or must necessarily be combined with — say the very highest 
sentiments man knows — Love to man, and Love to God ? If 
you do, you seem to me to have missed entirely the whole 
meaning of this intricate and varied progression of mankind. 
"What is it all but one great education for a life animated by 
these sentiments ? — a life not painfully compressed and impov- 
erished in order that those sentiments may live, (as our friend 
Cyril thinks,) but a life varied, cheerful, and busy, as seem the 
motes in a sunbeam, which yet, with all their movements, 
appear but as one ray from the source or fountain of all light. 
Of my confidence in the future I do not abate one jot. But in 
proportion as I see the grandeur of the end — this noble educa- 
tion of mankind — and the multiplicity of means that our Divine 
Instructor employs — in such proportion do I grow timid in the 
attempt to trace any portion of the programme of the future. 

We write down in our moral code that man shall not sell him- 
self to man. This is now our firm and established law. "We 
write down, what may not be altogether so permanent, that he 
shall sell his labour in market overt to the best bidder, for the 
day or the year, as the case may be. When I read the other 
day in our great popular journal, that the right and privilege of 
the English artisan is, that he can carry his labour to the market 
where " it will fetch its price, just as oil and tallow, or any other 
commodity," although I could not but acknowledge, as I read, 
that this was the best arrangement hitherto possible, and that he 
who sought to disturb it was simply a mischief-raakfir, yet I 
could not help recoiling from the idea presented to me ; I could 
not recognize in it the best possible arrangement for all time to 
come. A man's wages represent his subsistence, his life. One 
must wish, at all events, that no member of society should be 
dependent for the means of life upon changeful and precarious 
circumstances, altogether beyond his control, and which may 
make his labour a drug in the market. Remember that a pre- 
carious subsistence is not only an evil in itself, but renders 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 479 

almost impossible any cultivation of prudence, foresight, and 
other moral habits. I admit that the highest equity hitherto 
practicable is that the labourer shall freely sell his labour at the 
best price he can get. He brings his two hands and his hungry 
stomach into the market-place. Society gives him so much 
standing-room. Buy his labour, and he has a certain recognized 
status, and feeds conformably. If no one buys, he must beg. 
Public charity gives something grudgingly out of the granary ; it 
is unearned, and must be always felt as a degrading gift. The 
man is here amongst us, and must not die in the streets ; his mem- 
bership of society does amount to this. But what sort of mem- 
ber of society that man is likely to become, to whom employ- 
ment and subsistence are insecure — or how such a man is likely 
to bring up his children — the records of every jail in the country 
will testify. I have no scheme or project to propose, but I have 
a faith that the descendants of the present generation will gradu- 
ally rise into some better membership of society than this. 

That a time will come when that security for subsistence (as 
the reward of industry) without which there can be no high 
cultivation either of the intellect or of the affections, will be 
extended to all — is a faith which " no fire would burn, and no 
seas wash out of me." But I will only attempt to indicate cer- 
tain tendencies or principles of action which seem to be leading 
to this happy result. 

The extended operation of the principle of voluntary associa- 
tion is that which M. Guizot, a profound historian, a minister of 
state, a man not at all of an enthusiastic temperament, has fixed 
upon as the distinguishing characteristic of these later times. 
And I am sure few Englishmen will dissent from this opinion. 
Some of our greatest undertakings have been accomplished by 
the association of small capitalists ; it is thus our railroads have 
been laid down. Associations for the prosecution of science, for 
the encouragement of the fine arts, have sprung up around us. 
As to religious worship and religious teaching, there is not a 
village in England that has not its chapel and its school sup- 
ported by voluntary contribution. If every village has its 
chapel, every httle town has its benefit club, distinguished some- 
times under strange designations, as " Odd Fellows," and the 



480 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

like. That these are not new, but only increased in number, is 
the more favourable to the argument. 

A still more hopeful sign may be discovered in the fact that 
workmen have been permitted to deposit their savings as capital 
in the manufactories in which they still remained as workmen. 
I am not aware how frequently this has taken place ; but the 
late discussions upon the law of partnership have revealed the 
expectation of reflective men that such a practice will become 
frequent. Nothing could operate more beneficially on society 
than the frequent combination in the same person of capitalist 
and workman. It would tend to raise the whole body of work- 
men, and would have an admirable influence on the relationship 
between employer and employed. A large factory might become 
to all intents and purposes a large partnership, and wages grad- 
ually assume the character of a share in the profits. 

In such a factory the spirit of gambling would be checked. 
You will not confound an association of this description with 
joint-stock companies, which, unfortunately, have added new 
temptations to the spirit of gambling and of fraud. In these 
last, people deposit a portion of their capital, generally such por- 
tion as they can afford to lose ; they look for their dividend, but 
never look at all into the management of the common concern. 
This falls into the hands of a few clever and active men, who 
are tempted to commit frauds by the facilities for fraud placed 
before them. A new form of dishonesty rises amongst us, and 
there is a general outcry that the whole morality of the country 
is tainted. 

If I should predict that a factory will become a great perma- 
nent establishment, or partnership, in which there will be differ- 
ent ranks, according to the industry, prudence, and intelligence 
of the partners — in which generation after generation might rear 
their children in full confidence in the future — I shall be told 
that I am drawing largely on the imagination. I will limit my- 
self, therefore, to some reflections on the probable results of 
Abundance combined with Intelligence. I mean abundance ob- 
tained by industry, and of those products that are extendible to 
all. 

The connection between prosperity and amenity of manners 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 481 

and social affection is generally perceived and admitted. Want 
is very savage ; hunger and hatred are very near allied. All 
men recognize these truths ; and I have only to call attention to 
them. If men have to struggle for very life, for self-preserva- 
tion, all their being is absorbed in this one effort. This is nature's 
law, and a most wise one. Each creature must strive to the 
utmost for its own preservation. Men whose daily bread is a 
matter of daily anxiety, will have their thoughts so fixed on this 
one subject, that it will entirely occupy their field of mental vis- 
ion. Let them be, according to a common and very significant 
phrase, " beforehand with the world," — let them earn their sub- 
sistence by prospective and systematic labours — the field of vision 
expands. They are, at all events, in a condition wherein enlarged 
views of their own interest, and of the interest of the society to 
which they belong, may be taken. That they will take such 
views, will mainly depend on a collateral intellectual education, 
into which I shall enter by-and-by. 

How well is the ship navigated while every sailor moves to 
his function with sense of security ! He navigates the ship for 
his own safety, as well as the safety of others, but the sense of 
personal danger is not there to disturb or to engross him. But 
let the terror of shipwreck fall upon the crew, and "duty to the 
good ship" is necessarily gone — is transfoi-med into personal 
anxiety each one for his own preservation. Something like this 
takes place in the navigation of the good ship Society. There 
must be a freedom from the anxieties of self-preservation, if all 
are to take their parts in a spirit of duty to the whole. 

That abundance of the products of human industry, (food 
amongst others,) which at first sight seems to be merely the 
extension of the comforts and luxuries of the few to the many, 
is in reality the condition on which alone both few and many can 
rise to a high level of thought and action. You have somewhere 
said, Thorndale, in your Diary, that when the j)oet exclaims, — 

" Ah, when will all men's good 
Be each man's rule ! " 

he does not mean that it should be each man's motive. No, not 
his sole motive. But excuse me if I say you have only stated 
half the truth if you do not recognize that the desire for the 

21 



482 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

advancement and prosperity of some whole, of which we form 
a part, is itself a distinct and prominent motive in the minds of 
most cultivated men. It is a motive which will take a larger and 
larger share of their thoughts as men get disenthralled from per- 
sonal anxieties. We think and we work for others as well as 
for ourselves. It is a joy to do so. But it is not a sort of joy 
or motive that men can feel with fear of shipwreck before their 
eyes. 

The greatest blunder which speculative men have committed, 
and still commit, is a certain hankering after equality, or that 
justice which demands that each man should have the full un- 
diminished result of his own labour. If he does not positively 
wear the shoes he makes, he must receive a full equivalent for 
them. Very right it should be so, if other interests permit. But 
this is not the high and noble and ultimate principle of morality 
for which it is taken. The great unalterable principle of moral- 
ity is the preservation and advancement of the organic whole of 
society. But as this organic whole advances to its perfection, the 
condition of every individual member of it is raised ; and it may 
become the practicable object and very end of such a society, that 
the elements of a high and happy life be extended to all. Per- 
haps it might be accepted as a definition of a perfect state of 
society — that in which the good of the whole is tantamount to 
the highest kind of good for each. 

If a society had been organized on the principle of Equality, 
it never could have risen above the dead flat level of universal 
poverty. And introduce such a principle at any later period, it 
would still act as an antagonist to progress. Take a simple illus- 
tration. If the combined labour of twelve men could produce 
only a cloak for one, it would surely be better that they should 
make the one cloak than none at all. Thus only could they ever 
learn to make more cloaks. They make one : eleven of them, 
let us say, make a cloak ibr the one to wear (it will be probably 
that one who wears also a sword by his side — usurper, too, as it is 
called, of the land.) By-and-by, owing to improved processes of 
manufacture, cloaks are multiplied ; all the twelve have cloaks. 
But the same ingenuity that multiplied cloaks has also discovered 
a new and rare material for their manufacture, and one cloak is 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 483 

made of velvet or satin. Will you now introduce the principle 
of equality, and say that no velvet or satin shall be manufactured 
till it can be manufactured for all ? Any scheme, whether it calls 
itself by the name of Socialism or Communism, which proceeds 
on this principle of Equality, is evidently a scheme for repression 
of industry and the degradation of society. And the only excuse 
that can be given for men of intelligence and philanthropy ever 
falling into such schemes is, that the physical distress by which 
they were surrounded so occupied their minds, so engrossed their 
sympathies, that it seemed to them at the time that every thing 
should be forfeited, if only all could be well fed. 

All will be well fed, but not by limiting society to the task of 
procuring food, or by subordinating every thing else to this great 
task. It is a society doing many other things well, that will per- 
form this task well. 

One notices, not without interest, that the principle of equality 
has from time to time allied itself with an ascetic morahty. Moral 
and religious teachers, full of indignation at the spectacle they 
beheld of suffering on the one hand, and luxury on the other, 
have assailed an inequality of ranks, which seemed to them in- 
compatible with justice. And they could assail it the more freely 
as they were very willing to bring down all the world to that 
level of the quite indispensable, in which alone our inequalities 
could disappear. Happily their teaching, which would simply 
have destroyed whatever there was of decent or decorous in life, 
has been ineffectual. In fact, it is that very abundance which, 
under the name of luxury, they were stigmatizing (sometimes 
very excusably) that was preparing the way for a higher species 
of equality than they dreamt of, and for the application of even 
higher principles of morality than they had assumed for their 
guidance. 

That sentiment of Duty to some social body to which we be- 
long, which appears in some form in the rudest stages of society, 
is being constantly strengthened, and its field of action constantly 
enlarged. If you look well into it, you will find that both The 
Family and The Society, as they rise up spontaneously amongst 
us, are perpetually educating us to think and work for others as 
well as ourselves. In the family, each member of it is interested 



484 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

for the whole, as well as for himself. The father labours for his 
child, without knowing whether the child will ever repay the 
labour bestowed upon him ; it is an even chance, say the staticians, 
whether he will live to an age when he could render any service 
towards the support of his parents. I glanced formerly at the 
relationship of husband and wife, as it exists in savage life. 
How does the relationship alter as civilization advances ! Pity 
and excuse the poor savage, rather than blame him. If every 
day was a new chase after the day's food, how completely this 
business of food must have absorbed him, how utterly impossible 
it was for refined and unselfish feelings to grow up in him. 
They do grow up (God's greatest bounty to us) where the con- 
ditions of life permit their development. It was said, more elo- 
quently than truly, that the age of chivalry was gone. There is 
the essential feeling of chivalry in every citizen who proudly 
conducts his wife to the pleasant home which is the result of his 
own industry. The words which Shakspeare puts into the mouth 
of Catherine, in his Taming of the Shrew, very faithfully ex- 
press what is a general truth, when we compare civilized with 
savage life. The reformed shrew is stating the case of the hus- 
band, and may overstate his rights and dignities ; but she seizes 
upon a real substantial truth. 

" Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. 
Thy head, thy sovereign ; one that cares for thee 
And for thy maintenance; commits his body 
To painful labour, both by sea and land; 
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, 
While thou licst warm at home, secure and safe; 
And craves no other tribute at thy hands 
But love, fair looks, and true obedience." 

Beyond the family, and as members of society, men, you say, 
have not manifested much desire to w^ork for others. I know 
this, that the very organization of society has at all times com- 
pelled them to work, for others as well as for themselves ; that 
there has been no society, worthy of the name, in which men 
have not, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, 
laboured for others. To me nothing seems more plain than that 
the whole current of our world-education has this for one of its 
great results — the elevation of man above his own immediate 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 485 

wants, so that he may take interest in any national, or more 
limited association of men. Commerce is thought to bestow a 
very narrow, restricted, and seljish education ; but look with 
candour, and look attentively at commerce, where it is conducted 
by men who are no longer under the influence of immediate 
want or anxiety. Do you think that it is exclusively a love of 
gain that leads to such enterprises as the steamship that bridged 
the Atlantic for us ? It is not so that I read men. And note hi 
the great commercial world what confidence grows up in others. 
I sell house and land, and take a scrap of paper in return — a 
man's check upon his banker. I say that if you will look 
largely, and without prejudice, at the education which commerce 
is giving, you will find much to admire in it — habits of trust and 
confidence in each other, and enthusiasm for great undertakings, 
as well for the thing itself to be done, as for the profit made 
in doing it ; habits especially of systematic, prospective industry, 
labour for coming years, and not only for the support of the 
child, but for the future manhood of that child. 

Moral Progress ! Have you not encountered many able men 
who, at the very mention of moral progress, or an improvement 
in that actual code of morals enforced by public opinion, meet 
you with a very shout of derision? They can understand a 
material or industrial progress — they can understand that you 
may build better houses, make better clothes, muUiply every 
useful commodity, travel faster, and augment every means for 
communicating knowledge ; " but moral progress ! " they exclaim, 
" what is there, or can there be, new in morality, in its precepts 
or its motives ? From every pulpit in Christendom flows and 
fulminates a divine eloquence, setting forth the sublimest maxims 
of conduct, and enforcing them by the most terrible denunci- 
ations, and by promises which almost overwhelm the imagination 
by their grandeur. Such streams of divine eloquence have been 
flowing for these hundreds of years, and the type on which the 
world fashions itself remains much the same. Nay, if you choose 
to go back to the remotest antiquity, you shall find contemplative 
Brahmins teaching from their Vedas, or what not, how we are 
all brothers, and should love and help each other as brothers. 
It all profits nothing. The world listens to the moral rhapsody, 



486 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

listens and applauds, and goes on its old way. You cannot have 
more exalted morality taught than is taught in every parish 
church throughout England, nor enforced by more terrible pen- 
alties, or more sublime rewards. What can be the meaning of 
your Moral Progress ? " 

These clever people do not see that the industrial progress in 
which they have faith, is bringing about (in connection with other 
causes, this very one, for instance, of the Christian pulpit) that 
moral progress of which they are so incredulous — is giving us 
that condition of things in which the affections and the intellect 
can develop themselves in nobler proportions. The moral and 
religious teaching they allude to has its high office, but alone can 
do little for our advancement. 

Morality is, in one sense, of most venerable antiquity ; in 
another sense, it is the newest thing under the sun. There are 
certain general propositions and maxims which we hear repeated 
as soon as we hear any distinct utterance of man. But the 
application and interpretation which these maxims receive 
(which really constitute the moral code) is very various, and 
happily admits of improvement from age to age. It is a very 
poor fallacy to say that there can be nothing new in morality, 
because the same general principles have been enunciated from 
time immemorial. It is the understood application of those 
principles which constitutes the living morahty of the day. Be 
just ! Be honest ! Be charitable ! Forgive each other ! Love 
each other ! In every civilized period such precepts have been 
uttered ; some of them, however, very faintly. But what is 
being just ? What is being honest ? To what extent am I to 
be charitable, and to forgive others, and to serve others ? What 
are the modes in which I am to manifest my universal love and 
brotherhood? To these questions very different answers are 
given, and it is plainly the answer to these questions that reveals 
the actual morality of any period. To love their neighbour as 
themselves, taught men at one time to treat their slaves hu- 
manely, at another to manumit them altogether. What shall be 
held to satisfy the precept in our own day, is often found a diffi- 
cult matter to decide. 

The good of the whole, which is the paramount principle of 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 487 

morals, is necessarily appealed to at different epochs to sanction 
very different laws and customs. It was for the good of the 
whole that the great King should exist — should rule, and domi- 
neer, and compel men to combined industry. It was for the 
good of the whole that a feudal Baron, taking up the powers of 
government with the rights of property, should execute what 
rude justice he was able. It is for the good of the whole, at the 
present moment, that the great Capitalist exercises an absolute 
power over his " hands," as they are sometimes not inexpres- 
sibly called. The good of the whole may sanction very different 
relations between man and man — very different rights, duties, 
responsibilities. But as power and intelligence increase and 
diffuse themselves, The good of the whole approximates nearer 
and nearer to The good of each one of the whole. 

A perfect moral code must be the last product of our pro- 
gressive humanity — the result of the full development of its 
powers, affections, and intelligence. Our standard of The good, 
that state we wish for all, must be elevated, as our means of 
realizing that condition for all, are augmented. It is very true, 
as the great Hebrew prophet said, that God does from time to 
time " write a new law in our hearts ; " but it is in his own 
grand creative way. 

I am reminded here that it is impossible to do full justice to 
this subject of Industrial Progress, unless I revert to other lines 
of progress — Religious and Scientific Progress — and bring these 
down to the same epoch on which we are now standing. To 
these, therefore, I must now address myself. 

So interlaced are all parts of our great subject, that I have 
a difficulty in determining the best order in which to treat them. 
The simplest method I can devise is, in the next place, to say 
what occurs to me on the topic of Religious Progress ; then, 
having touched upon, I. Industrial Progress, and, II. Religious 
Progress, I shall be at liberty to discourse somewhat more 
freely on. III. Intellectual or Scientific Progress, This is not 
a very logical programme; for the thiixl, and last, of these 
divisions necessarily embraces much that might be introduced 
under the two previous head*, and indeed carries us very widely 
over the whole field of human progress. But it is the best 
programme I can devise. 



488 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

Section VI. — Progress in, and through, Religion. 

There is a Law of Progress enunciated by M. Comte which 
has been received with favour by a few eminent thinkers in 
England. I need not state it at any length. You are familiar 
with its three stages — the Theological, the Metaphysical, and 
the Positive. Many subtle truths, bearing on the great subject 
of human progress, have been elicited by the author of this law, 
and arranged under these consecutive divisions ; but as a law 
of the progressive development of the human mind, I cannot 
possibly receive it. 

In our psychological inquiry, we saw that from the very 
nature of the growth or development of our ideas, there was 
a necessary transition through imagination or guesswork into 
truth. Combinations of ideas are first formed by the mind 
itself, and these combinations receive the name of truth if they 
are found to bear comparison, or to harmonize with nature. It 
is thus we rise to higher and wider knowledge than the senses 
can directly give us. We exchange our imaginations for theo- 
ries. There is a necessary transit through error into science. 
One may even say that, without error, the very idea of truth, as 
an object of our search, could never have occurred. It is the 
discovered discrepancy between the spontaneous imagination 
and the course of nature that startles us into c?/sbelief, and 
thence into inquiry. All ideation as well as perception is, at 
first, synonymous with belief. 

This function of the imagination is, I apprehend, the funda- 
mental truth expressed in M. Comte's law, and the only truth to 
which we can give so broad a title as a law of progress. What 
he designates as the Theological and Metaphysical stages, are 
only two forms of the imagination. In the one, a person is 
imagined as the cause of events ; in the other, a thing, an 
essence, or a force. And although the second may he elaborated 
from the first — the shadowy person being converted into as 
shadowy an essence, and the imagined will into an imagined 
force — yet the imagination certainly does not pass in every case 
from the one to the other. The most frequent origin of the 
second or Metaphysical mode of th+nking, has been the illusion 
which language throws over us. A word which in reality ex- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 489 

presses only a collection of certain things or certain properties, 
is supposed to express some specific essence or occult substance, 
the cause of all these properties. This source of error may be 
quite independent of the Theological stage ; as when, in our own 
day, Heat is presumed at once (without any scientific inquiry 
which may, or may not, justify the presumption) to be a specific 
matter, causing our sensations, and those extei*nal changes and 
movements we ascribe to it. In reality, we have nothing before 
us hut these sensations and these external movements. We 
gather them together under the term Heat ; and then, from the 
very nature and use of language, we speak of Heat as the cause 
of these sensations, and these external changes in the matter 
around us. Thus the Metaphysical stage has, or may have, a 
quite independent origin from the Theological. 

But the main and obvious reason I have for expressing my 
dissent from M. Comte's law, is the implication it contains that 
Theology is based entirely or solely on the imagination ; or, in 
other words, that it is altogether a mere transitional form of 
thought. Now, if we place ourselves in other subjects, as 
science or government, there has been a theological mode of 
thinking here which may be justly described as transitional; 
but if we place ourselves in Theology itself, we do not find that 
theology deserts us as we proceed, but that higher forms of 
theology arise. M. Comte represents the Theological stage as 
merging, or having a tendency wholly to merge, in the Positive 
or scientific. This, in common with the vast majority of think- 
ing men, I must deny — not without some surprise that such an 
assertion should ever have been made. One thing is palpable, 
that, as matter of fact, no such tendency has yet been ex- 
hibited by mankind. It is matter of history and observation 
that old religions die out — into new religions. There is not the 
least tendency yet observed for religion to merge altogether into 
science, but there is a tendency for science to rise into religion ; 
witness our " Bridge water Treatises," which, if I were a bold man, 
I should say were introducing some new modifications of our 
general faith. 

Tlie fundamental truth, I repeat, and that which really con- 
stitutes a law, or method of progress, is this — that we neces- 

21* 



490 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

sarily proceed through imagination into reason, through error 
into truth. We do this in theology as we do it in science. 
Theology passes through its imagihative stage just as astronomy 
does ; but there is a true theology just as there is a true as- 
tronomy. Here also the imaginative is the forerunner of the 
examined and reasonable conviction. Not that there is the 
same direct objective knowledge of God as there is of a planet- 
ary system, but that the whole of nature, as scientifically under- 
stood, stands out to us as a created whole, and is intelligible only 
as the manifestation of a Divine Idea. 

Theology, from its very character, must always overlook the 
whole of nature and of man. Certain modes of theological 
thinking which have assisted to build up governments, or to 
prompt to speculative knowledge, have passed away, but the 
result has always been that human society, and the laws of 
nature, were finally surveyed from a new theological point of 
view. Science breaks loose from one mode of theology, in order 
to pursue her free and independent labours, but ends in herself 
creating another mode of theology, under which her own truths 
receive their full significance. 

Let us contemplate without reserve the imaginative forms 
of theology, which, as our knowledge advances, become purer 
and less imperfect, and which also have their fit place and 
appropriate office in the successive stages of human progress. 
We shall find here also an harmonious progression. 

Looking back at the earliest known stages of human develop- 
ment, nothing is more remarkable than the part Imagination has 
played. In other words, the combinations first formed amongst 
our thoughts have been most wild and unreal. You would say 
that dreams were the first thoughts of man. And it is true 
enough that the moment the strict wants of his physical nature 
cease to guide him, his thinking is very much like a dream. 
Why should it not be ? For the dream is still a sort of human 
thinking, imperfect enough, but manifesting, at all events, an 
independence of the immediate impulses of sense. 

But this imagination, this day-dream, these mythologies, these 
heroes and demigods, these cosmogonies, and I know not what 
beside — are we to conclude that this stage of growth was utterly 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 491 

lawless, and that it was not, in fact, strictly preparatory to subse- 
quent stages ? Not so. It will be found, on examination, that 
this era of imagination, like every subsequent era, prepared its 
successor, and that this theological imagination was the precursor 
(whatever other purpose it effected) of a grand and rational 
theology. 

It is by the religious imagination — through gods and divina- 
tion and the like — that man first starts into intellectual life. 
What make you of this ? That the intellectual life shall, at a 
subsequent period, altogether depart from its original direction, 
and ignore religion ? I, for my part, find that the first dream of 
imagination is i7i a line with the last truth of reason. I find the 
whole series one consistent development. Religion grows with 
science, and they are ultimately seen to be inseparable. 

"What is the theological imagination of early times ? It is 
essentially this — that man transports himself into nature — en- 
dues the great objects or powers of nature with human feeling, 
human will — and so prays and w^orships, and hopes to propitiate, 
and to obtain aid, compassion, deliverance. Well, this primitive 
imagination is in the line of truth. We begin with throwing a 
man's thought there into nature ; we purify and exalt our im- 
aginary being ; we gradually release him from the grosser 
passions of mankind. We are, in fact, rising ourselves above 
the domination of those grosser passions ; and as we grow wise 
and just, we make the god wise and just, beneficent and humane. 
Meanwhile science begins to show us this goodly whole as the 
creation of one Divine Artificer. And now we recognize, not 
without heart-beatings, that God indeed is not man, but that he 
has been educating man to comprehend him in part, and to be 
in part like him. 

Are not the Imagination and the Reason here strictly afiili- 
ated ? We begin, as it has been boldly and truly said, by 
making God in our own imaofe. What else could we do ? Na- 
ture had not yet revealed herself to us in her great unity, as one 
whole, as the manifestation of one Power. We make God in 
our own image, but by-and-by, as our conceptions on every side 
enlarge, we find that it is God who is gradually elevating us by 
the expansion of our knowledge into some remote similitude with 



492 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

himself. He is making us, in one sense, in his own image. 
This correspondence between the human and the Divine is the 
keynote of all religion ; and Imagination, in her ai^parently wild 
and random way, had struck upon the note. 

God is making man in his own image when he reveals to 
him the creation in its true nature, when he inspires him with 
a knowledge of the whole, and a love for the good of the whole. 
But the first step in this divine instruction was precisely the 
bold imagination by which man threw out into nature an image 
of himself. The form that imagination threw into the air was 
gradually modified and sublimed as man rose in virtue, and 
nature was better understood, till at length it harmonizes with, 
and merges into a truth of the reason. Was man to wait for his 
God and his religion till his consciousness, in all other respects, 
was fully developed ? Or was the revelation of the great truth 
to be sudden? Apparently not. Man dreamt a god first. But 
the dream was sent by the same Power, or came through the 
same laws, that revealed the after-truth. Nay, he dreams on 
still, and reasons on still, up to this very epoch ; and the dream 
is penetrated by the truth, and the truth is still beneficently pic- 
tured to him in the dream. 

To tell us to believe in God because savages have believed, is 
a miserable style of argument. But from the height of your 
own demonstration I invite you to look back upon the childlike 
fancies of earliest epochs, and see how these were at once a sub- 
stitute and a preparation for the Truth you now hold. In those 
days men had no demonstration ; they had imagination instead ; 
but such an imagination as would refine as the man refined, till 
at length it became almost one with truth. 

Men have always suspected that there was some great office 
performed by the Imagination, although the very name implies 
error, or some species of delusion. The simple fact is, that our 
first science, and our first history, and our first religion, took 
necessarily those wild forms we call by the name of Imagination. 
How could it be otherwise ? If man was to think beyond what 
the senses had directly given him, he must first throw some wild 
guesswork into the air, and then, by comparing it bit by bit with 
nature, improve and shape it into a truth. Wonder not, there- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 



493 



fore, that the intellectual progress of man has been hitherto of so 
eccentric a character. It is simple fact that he dreamt first that 
he might have in these very dreams new subjects for thought, 
for comparison, for judgment. Out of faiths of the imagination 
he shapes, under the eye of nature, a new truth of the reason. 

There is no portion of the history of man which excites in 
us so intense an interest as the progress he has made in, and 
through, religion. On all sides, and in every department of 
thought and action, he has been stirred, guided, and controlled 
by theological imaginations ; and these theological imaginations 
can only be contemplated as bold anticipations of the coming 
truth — provisional faiths, forming a kind of provisional govern- 
ment for the human race, till the time shall come when all na- 
tions shall be gathered together under the one government, and 
in the felt presence and power of the infinite and beneficent 
Creator ! How suddenly and boldly the mind seems to expand 
in every direction under the influence of the great idea of re- 
ligion! I have been speaking hitherto of industrial progress. 
How slow, and steady, and near the earth, does this movement 
appear to be ! What a diflerent movement we have to describe 
when we turn to man's imaginative faculties, and his speculative 
and -rhtellectual progress as hnked to his early religions ! Here 
he seems to fly through the air before he lights upon the 
ground. What is common and familiar is the last thing he 
deigns to look at. 

Viewing man in this his high imaginative aspect, his nature 
seems suddenly to alter before us. From a creature guided by 
his senses, and stimulated to action by unremitting wants and 
appetites, he has become a star-gazer, and the most omnipotent 
of dreamers. We find him with his eye and his heart in the 
clouds ; he is beset with invisible spirits ; his own shadow, mul- 
tiplied and magnified, pursues him everywhere, and he never 
knows that it is his own shadow ; he consults it for his oracle, it 
speaks to him from the thunder, from the voice of birds, in the 
dreams of the night. So completely is imagination in the ascend- 
ant, that he no longer always sees and hears with his senses, 
sometimes sees and hears what the fancy puts before him ; at all 
times conjures up monstrous fictions. 



494 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

You would say now that it was the distant, the remote, and 
the unseen that first kindled his intellect. And so it is. Thus 
begins his life of thought, of speculative inquiry. This creature 
of daily wants and hourly appetites looked out at the stars above 
him, to read in them his future destiny. He had travelled to 
them in imagination long before he knew, or cared to know, 
what people lay on the other side of the river, or the mountain, 
that bounded his own territory. That the fate of man in this 
w^orld lay in man and in this world, was far too simple a thought 
for him to stoop to ; there was a whole universe beyond which 
had far more influence upon him than any thing that was mov- 
ing upon the face of the earth. 

How did he teach himself the fine arts ? He learnt sculpture 
by shaping for himself a god he had never seen ; and his grand- 
est lesson in architecture was the raising a temple which was to 
be inhabited by no one, or by nothing but the marble statue he 
himself had formed. Music was cultivated that it might be a 
language fit for the gods to hear ; and to my fancy the most 
beautiful music has always retained in it something of religion : 
it is the plaint of human passion, but uttered as if in hearing of 
the gods — uttered and half subdued ; I always feel that it is the 
troubled soul pouring out its agony under the w/itroubled sky 
where dwell the serene Powers. How did he first teach himself 
a higher morality than such as the gross multitude were im- 
posing on each other ? Here and there the fervid man arose, 
grasping an imaginary hand from Heaven. By that help he 
first stood upright. How simple a matter does it seem to learn 
temperance ! What is it but the very rule of enjoyment, though 
coarser minds will not see it as such ? What is it but the avoid- 
ance of that too much which turns all to bitterness and pain ? 
Nothing more simple. In no such simple manner did our pris- 
tine sage learn it. He did not, with calculating prudence, sacri- 
fice the less to the greater, or the pleasure of to-day to the ease 
and contentment of to-morrow. He took the whole allotment of 
his pleasures, pains, passions, bodily enjoyments, and flung it 
disdainfully in the dust, and trod.it under foot. Then he walked 
forth companion of the gods ! — free as they from want or care. 
Such was his first lesson of temperance. He scorned his mate- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 495 

rial, marvellous body altogether — the sublime simpleton that he 
was. 

You would say that he comes down to his own terrestrial inter- 
ests ; he descends from some celestial altitude to the daily con- 
cerns of this world. He builds in Heaven first. There he first 
constructs his ideal societies. See, he has arrived — in that celes- 
tial climate — at the goal of all his wishes, before he has stirred 
a foot on earth to the accomplishment of any one of them. Lean 
as a skeleton, and almost naked as a worm, the Indian saint or 
sage has already constructed his Seven Heavens, and taken pos- 
session of them all by turns. 

It is worth our while to note that he has no sooner framed for 
himself a rule of conduct, no sooner fixed his regard on the high 
mental life of contemplation, and of noble sentiment, than he 
begins to quarrel with his nature. The high destiny marked out 
for him by this ability to frame a rule of conduct, and to live so 
much in contemplation, does not impress his mind so vividly as 
the difficulty he experiences in constantly obeying his rule, or 
living his high contemplative life. Almost the first great hypoth- 
esis he is heard uttering is, that there must be some corrupt prin- 
ciple in matter, in this material body, else how account for his 
own inconsistencies ; he must by all means separate himself from 
this base alliance. When he is driven from this hypothesis, and 
becomes ashamed of attributing his spiritual failings to his mate- 
rial substance, he shifts his ground, and finds that his spiritual 
nature is corrupt, that the original depravity lies there. In this 
injustice which he does himself, I find a striking testimony of his 
own noble striving, and a grand augury of what he is destined to 
become. 

Section VII. — Effect of early religious faiths on Laws and 
Government. 

The first great governments were formed by war, and cemented 
by slavery. A Despot rules by mere arbitrary power, and through 
all the relations of life we see the same arbitrary power. What 
is to control a Despotism of this kind ? There may be a public 
opinion protesting against its iniquity, but how can it act ? What 
can the weak multitude do ? Unarmed, undisciplined, educated 



496 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

in fear, incapable of combination, they can effect nothing — unless, 
indeed, some one common sentiment of rage kindles and unites 
the whole multitude, and casts them, blind and irresistible, head- 
long, like the torrent or the whirlwind, against their oppressor. 
There is no antagonistic power, you would say, on earth, to con- 
trol this military tyrant. But there is such a power, and it exists 
in the very imagination of this weak and down-trodden multitude. 
The weak are still the many, and the one man, or the few, cannot 
withstand the infectious fears of an imaginative multitude. Will- 
ing or unwilling, the strongest are borne along by the torrent of 
a popular fanaticism. The many are always the despot here. 
The great man is but a greater child ; he is weak as an infant in 
face of a popular superstition. If it does not possess him also, it 
subdues him. If he is not its pupil, he must be its slave. The 
very human instruments he must use, fail him ; he has perhaps 
kindled a sacred frenzy in the hearts of thousands, who are now 
raised above all fear, and strike but as one man. When the mul- 
titude enthroned some terrible Zeus, or Moloch, on the hills or 
above the clouds, and gave to him their sense of justice, they 
knew not, probably, that they were creating a despot for their 
own earthly despot. But so it was. There was a court of ap- 
peal established, to which, if he outraged excessively their feel- 
ings of humanity, they could drag him for condemnation. 

Unfortunately an offence against some custom of religion, more 
frequently than an outrage on humanity, has kindled the anger 
of the multitude. And it is also true that a double fear, and a 
despot above the clouds as well as the one on earth, has oppressed 
the minds of men. This only shows the imperfection of our 
provisional faiths ; the outline I have sketched is still not incor- 
rect. 

But it is when we see earnest men beginning to think for the 
good of mankind, themselves powerfully impressed with the 
common faith of the multitude, that we see how great an agent 
religion has been in moulding and advancing the human society. 
The world (as long as it has been known to us in history) has 
never been so deserted as to be without some minds, loftier than 
the rest, to whom great wishes, larger ideas, and a solicitude for 
the general good, have been vouchsafed. Priests and prophets 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 497 

are the names such men bore in former times. Genuine priests 
and sincere believers in the faiths they were elevating and ap- 
plying (without any artifice or policy of application) to the good 
government of the world. I need not contend against that false 
and feeble view entertained by some amongst us in the last cen- 
tury, that Priests, from the very earliest times, used the supersti- 
tion of the people intentionally as a mere instrument of law and 
polity. One man advances above the rest, but not abruptly, not 
loosening himself on all sides at once ; if he did, he would be 
utterly useless. By what stretch of conjecture could we suppose 
that a Druidical priest, for instance, reasoned like Polybius, or 
like a French academician of the eighteenth century ? The 
greatest mind would, at these epochs, be precisely the most super- 
stitious or religious. The Judge in the skies was not only the 
power by which he was to control others, it was the power that 
fortified and elevated his own mind and will. By belief in that 
power he rose to be a teacher and a ruler. 

It is through religion, therefore, not only that the opinion of 
the suffering many has been able to assert itself against a des- 
potic ruler, but that the opinion of the contemplative Few has 
been able to assert itself and claim reverence from the Many. 
This last we may look upon as one of the greatest offices of re- 
ligion. An opinion did not wait till it could gather for itself the 
united suffi-age and support of a selfish, loosely connected, and 
irreflective multitude, before it governed that multitude ; it stept 
at once into power as the will of the god, whose interpreter the 
wise man, or priest, had already constituted himself. Such knowl- 
edge as there was, ruled in the person of the priest, who often 
stood between the people and their king, and often between both 
and God. 

I do not need to be reminded that the Priesthood were men, 
and that power brought with it the thirst for greater power, and 
that an alliance was often formed between the Priesthood and 
the Monarchy which had not for its object, conspicuously or pre- 
eminently, the interest of the people. But even this alliance had 
its terms and conditions, which were favourable, in the main, to 
the cause of the people. If the Prince held his throne of the 
god, this great Suzerain exacted a certain allegiance from the 



498 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

Prince. Even if the Prince were in some wild manner elevated 
to a god himself — if he was proclaimed some half-brother to the 
sun — his godship brought this inconvenience with it, that he per- 
petually had a Priesthood for his ministers. His cabinet council 
was sitting in the Temple, and he must sit there too. 

Under other forms of government than a monarchy, and in 
matters strictly judicial — as where enraged equals were to be 
brought within the pale of the law — the aid of a priesthood was 
equally serviceable. The free man gave his revenge into the 
hands of a god, when he would not have intrusted it to any 
human judge. " The gods will see to it," has appeased many 
an infuriated pursuer. Or the precincts of the Temple have 
thrown their protecting shadow over the victim. " It is holy 
ground, you cannot strike here." And when the wrongdoer has 
triumphed in the injury he inflicted, and was too strong to be 
punished, the sense of justice was not baulked or suffered to die 
out. " There is a Power that can send down disease, and death, 
and madness. Somewhere — in some manner — at some time — a 
terrible retribution will ensue. Be assured the gods will punish." 
And lo ! the man dies, or sickens, flills mad or blind, and the god 
has punished. Example never to be forgotten. 

In these and other ways Religion has been instrumental in 
introducing good laws and sustaining civil government. But 
here let me make an observation that is of wide application on 
this great subject of Human Progress. It does not follow, 
because good laws and good government were thus, in part, 
introduced, that, once established, they will continue to need the 
same kind of support from religion. Once established, men will 
learn to appreciate them for their own sakes — which the multi- 
tude could not do till after long experience of their benefit. The 
history of Human Progress affords us many instances where a 
certain condition of things is necessary to introduce an institu- 
tion, but is not necessary to uphold it when introduced. It 
stands then on its own merit. Wars and conquest were necessary 
for the origin of the nation, and the first patriotism was called 
forth by the antagonism to some hostile people. But the great 
national union, once formed, perpetuates itself by the innumera- 
ble advantages that spring from it ; and happily there arises a 



THE devp:lopment of society. 499 

patriotism of peace as well as of war. A certain unreasoning 
spontaneity brings forward into existence what is afterwards 
embraced for itself ; and passion and imagination build up what 
the reason afterwards applauds, completes, and improves. 

Amongst the advanced nations of the world, laws and govern- 
ment are sufficiently understood and valued to be sustained for 
their own sakes. But over the greater part of the earth obedi- 
ence to government is still half a superstition. 

So connected is our terrestrial progress with the development 
of our religious ideas, that we seem to see the moral and social 
revolutions of mankind symbolized for us in a sort of mythologi- 
cal procession that has passed along the skies. The god of war- 
riors is fierce and vindictive, terrible to their enemies, capricious 
to themselves. The citizen and the patriot desire justice and 
good faith, and their celestial Ruler sits in the seat of justice, 
and punishes crime and violated treaties. A still more advanced 
people, embued with benevolence, at least with the admiration 
of it, find in their god the spirit of benevolence, who requires a 
like spirit in his worshippers. Not deeds only, but the very 
thoughts are now brought before his judgment-seat. Men even 
give their own piety to the god. 

And I would note this — that as each era of human progress 
grows out of its predecessor, (by some modification of, or addi- 
tion to it,) we may expect to find the religious conceptions of 
one age forming a groundwork, or preparation, for the religious 
conceptions of the succeeding age. The history of mankind 
would reveal to us, at least, some instances of a progression of 
this nature — instances where you would say that the earlier 
faiths, rude and violent as their character might be, were not 
only suitable to the age in which they rose, but formed the 
necessary groundwork for the faith adapted to the succeeding 
age. 

Section VIII. — Nature-worship — The personal God. 

Let it displease no one that Imagination is so active in the 
early stages of religious faith. This is the mode in which the 
mind proceeds towards truth. This is the method in which God 
creates a human intelligence. Many men are disposed to think 



500 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

that the idea of God must have been communicated to us in 
some exceptional manner, some peculiar mode of revelation or 
intuition. But there is no other mode conceivable by us than that 
gradual growth of the intelligence, which is no other than God's 
progressive creation. That the last and sublimest conception of 
God — that any conception which a reflective man of the present 
era would admit as approaching to the truth — is a universal 
intuition, or innate idea, is contradicted at once by all history 
and all observation. And that it could be revealed in any 
miraculous way through the medium of language^ is impossible ; 
for those who are to receive an idea through the medium of 
language, must have already attached a meaning to the words 
used. A voice from the skies, or from a fellow-man, proclaim- 
ing, " There is a God ! " would proclaim nothing to those who 
had attached no meaning to the word " God." To those who 
had already associated some vague, or wild, or imperfect mean- 
ing to the term, it would merely repeat and confirm thgir own 
pi'evious convictions. 

Those Mdio have made the history of religion a subject of 
especial study, have in general concluded that it was not a 
supernatural object at all that men first worshipped ; it was a 
quite natural object ; it was the sun that shone above them — • 
the river that made the earth fertile. The sense of dependence 
upon nature would be the first feeling manifested ; the external 
objects themselves would appear as our benefactors and destroy- 
ers. But for this very reason that we view them as benefactors 
and destroyers, do we invest them, at the same time, with some 
feeling of benevolence and anger. It was an external object that 
was worshipped, but yet an object endowed with supernatural 
attributes. An imaginary will and imaginary passions were 
associated with the forms and powers of nature. 

How could a childlike mind, it has been said, avoid attributing 
a benevolent power to the moving and half-living river flowing 
on for ever ? Its stream is the very life of the earth. And this 
earth, again, does it not throw, as from its lap, year after year, 
abundance of food — grass for our cattle, if hitherto nothing else ? 
But the earth is not always fruitful, and the skies sometimes 
withhold their showers. What is to be done ? We have but 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 501 

our prayers. Like very children we can cry aloud. Will that 
avail ? Or shall we bring offerings ? Or does any one know 
any symbols or signs by which to speak to this earth and these 
skies, so that they may be brought to regard us with com- 
passion ? 

When any great object, like the sun, for instance, was thus 
worshipped, and thus animated with a human spirit, it would 
not be long before this spirit would be contemplated as passing 
in and out of the great luminary, as capable of subsisting apart ; 
and thus the way would be prepared for the free and personal 
god. 

Such is an explanation often given, and it seems at least to 
have been one course which the imagination has taken. No 
fact is more notorious, than that a worship of nature did at an 
early time extend over most nations of the earth. This is not a 
matter of speculation or conjecture, but of history. 

There is, however, another and more direct course, which the 
imagination is supposed to have taken in framing for itself a 
personal god. The dead man, if we have loved him, if we have 
honoured him, if we have feared him, is not altogether dead to 
us because the breath has left the body. We think him living 
somewhere still. Wliy not in those voices of the night and of 
the tempest ? Why not in this invisible wind ? The very fact 
that so potent an agent as the air is invisible, aids the imagina- 
tion to this conception of the invisible human power that may 
be moving about us. This idea of the incorporeal invisible man 
once received into the imagination, would be the fruitful source 
of any multitude of gods or demons. Such an invisible being 
once conceived, it would soon cease to be necessary to suppose 
that it had formerly been man. The fancy could just as readily 
pronounce it to have been god or demon from the beginning. 

Even without having recourse to the dead man, is there not in 
the very activities of nature an apparent reflection to us of our 
own activities, our own passions, which at once prompts us either 
to animate the external object itself, with a spirit similar to man, 
or to suppose the external object to be moved or influenced by 
some such spirit ? 

To determine which of these modes of imagination I have 



502 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

briefly described, took precedence, does not appear to me to be 
possible. How much of any given mythology to attribute to 
hero-worship, and how much to nature-worship, has been often 
the subject of discussion amongst our antiquarians ; it was one of 
the earliest subjects of discussion amongst the Greeks themselves. 
One observation may be safely made ; that both processes of 
thought conduct to the same climax. The personification of 
nature leads up to a god seen out of and above nature ; and the 
hero-god is endowed with a power over the elements. The 
nature-god takes upon himself the government of men, and 
the monarch-god extends his sceptre over all nature. 

Long before science had taught the essential unity of the 
world, the reflective mind must have felt that, let there be innu- 
merable gods, there must be some one god above them all. This 
blade of corn, for which I am to thank the rulers of the earth 
and skies — tell me, do I owe it to the air, or the river, or the 
earth, or the sun ? To all — to all, ye gods ; and I think to 
some greater god than all, that overruled to this united action 
the several powers of this world. Dimly above the whole con- 
clave of deities appears that Fate, destined, as the mind of man 
advances, to descend and take all the celestial region to itself. 
Or else some one of the mythological or national deities extends 
its attributes, till it has dominion over all nature, and finally the 
creation of all nature. 

Whether originally a nature spirit or a human spirit, the god 
would receive his moral character from that of his worshippers. 
Men not yet gathered into cities, shepherds living much amongst 
their sheep in the open plains, having much to suffer and endure 
from nature, little from their fellow-men, leading themselves a 
very monotonous life, might regard the gods as those who give 
and destroy, without often associating their acts of beneficence 
and destruction with any conduct, good or bad, of mankind. 
They would seek to propitiate the gods in many ways against 
the drought or the murrain; but, in their uniform lives, the 
drought or the murrain might not take the form of the punish- 
ment of any immoral or unjust conduct of their own. A moral 
character in their god might be very faintly shadowed out to 
them. But if we transfer ourselves from such a pastoral life to 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 503 

the life of men gathered together in multitudes, in the city or 
the camp, we see that the actions of the gods will not fail to be 
regarded as the effects or consequence of some human conduct. 
There is always something in human life to stand out as the 
cause of the god's anger. It is now the avenger of crime that 
is wanted, and that is seen in the skies. 

But with a rude and fierce people, this avenger of crime may 
still be a terrific, arbitrary, capricious Power, by no means iden- 
tical with that Moral Governor of the world a subsequent age 
depicts to itself. The changes in the moral character given to 
their deity, so far as these arise amongst any one people, might 
become the subject of a very interesting speculation. I am 
inclined to think there was a necessary transition through the 
fiercer and more terrible conceptions of God, to those conceptions 
which have been admitted to exercise the most salutary restraint 
and influence upon human society. 

It may, at all events, reconcile us to the ferocious aspect in 
which the Past so frequently presents itself, if in those feroci- 
ties themselves should be found the necessary condition for the 
development of convictions that have cultivated, and educated 
the conscience of subsequent generations of mankind ; — if early, 
and to us revolting conceptions of the Divine Power were 
moulded afterwards into those worthier conceptions, which (more 
than any one cause) have disciplined the human race into moral 
conduct. 

Section IX. — God of Terror — God of Justice — God of Love. 

A form of religion which we justly look back upon as to us 
most odious, may yet have been in accordance with the times 
which produced it, which perhaps could have produced no other, 
and it may also have been a necessary condition for subsequent 
forms, which we may still highly approve, and which manifestly 
have been of supreme value in the education of the human 
race. 

Pain and Fear are not the most agreeable subjects of con- 
templation; but they lie at the root of all that is grandest in 
Humanity. Nature is not always kind ; the earth withholds her 
harvests ; it lies parched, and the cattle die, and there is destruc- 



504 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

tion and pestilence issuing as from the sun itself. It is at these 
times a terrible Power, and one which can inflict immeasurable 
evil, that man sees above him. 

Is there not the Night also, as well as the Day, to stimulate 
the imagination ? Plow weak, and in the hands of what unknown 
powers, does man feel himself to be, when, deprived of light, he 
looks, or strives to look, out into an infinite darkness ? Is not 
the Night around him, is not Death before him ? — Death, that 
first startles the man into speculative thinking. 

But if we could really understand how it is, and by what steps, 
a god of Terror moves to the throne of heaven, we must contem- 
plate the passions of w^ar, the passions stirred in man by conflict 
with his fellows-man. When the agony of strife, when the de- 
struction he would inflict, when the wrong he has received, has 
kindled his unquenchable anger and revenge, what is the spec- 
tacle we then behold ? It is no longer the harvest men beseech 
of God, the cooling rain, or health to the cattle in the field ; 
they have but one passionate prayer, and that is for destruction 
— destruction of their enemies. God the Destroyer is the only 
Deity they then can worship. It must needs be that the God 
they summon forth is no amiable or beneficent being ; they do not 
want his amiability ; they want his power ; they want his fierce- 
ness ; they wish him to be vindictive like themselves ; let there 
be thunder in the heavens, only let the bolt fall on their enemies. 
They animate their deity with all their own revenge and anger, 
and thirst for destruction ; and then, what will they not do, or 
give, or suffer, to win this dreadful Power to their side ? 

But why do I point to the god of Terror as so necessary a con- 
ception ? Partly this may be seen at once. These fierce men 
have raised there in heaven a power to quell their enemies. 
Such a power, and no other, was needful to quell and subdue 
themselves. The god of pure and beneficent justice, ruling and 
appointing all for the good of men, and for the culture of virtue, 
would have been unintelligible and inefiective here. The power 
that must subdue such men, must strike as with an infinite anger. 
It is the power this barbarian raises to subdue his foes, that ends 
in subjecting himself. He comes to tremble in his turn before 
the avenger. We say his conscience will by-and-by smite him 
to the ground. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 505 

I am dealing with no fiction when I speak of this early wor- 
ship of a god of terror. Other gods, and blander worships, may 
also be descried in remote antiquity ; but, peering into the dim 
past, the first things we recognize — are war, and the god whom 
the passions of war had characterized. What other god could 
it have been that was universally worshipped with human sacri- 
fices ? 

The prevalence of this rite of human sacrifice in very remote 
times is undisputed. In the epoch of -what we may call classical 
antiquity, it had happily become a rare occurrence ; men had 
learnt to look upon the rite with abhorrence ; but in the litera- 
ture of Greece, and Rome, and Judaea, there are distinct traces 
that the rite had at an earHer time been prevalent. I have no 
learned books here to refer to, but perhaps the following extract, 
which I made on one occasion from the " Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica," may serve to refresh your memory with regard to certain 
facts, on which I am not aware there is any serious difiference 
amongst our scholars or historians. Under the head of Human 
Sacrifice, it says, — 

" The practice prevailed in every nation under heaven, of which we have 
received any account. The Egyptians had it in the earlier part of their raon- 
archy. The Cretans likewise had it, and retained it for a long time. The 
nations of Arabia did the same. The people of Dumah, in particular, sacri- 
ficed every year a child, and buried it underneath an altar, which they made 
use of instead of an idol; for they did not admit of images. The Persians 
buried people alive. The Cyprians, the Rhodians, the Phocians, the lonians, 
those of Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, all had human sacrifices. The nations of the 
Tauric Chersonese offered up to Diana every stranger whom chance threw on 
their coasts. The Pelasgians, in a time of scarcity, vowed the tenth of all that 
should be born to them for a sacrifice, in order to procure plenty. Aristomenes, 
the Messenian, slew three hundred noble Lacedemonians, among whom was 
Theopompus. the king of Sparta, at the altar of Jupiter, at Ithome. Without 
doubt the Lacedemonians did not fail to make ample return ; for they were a 
severe and revengeful people, and offered similar victims to Mars. Phylarchus, 
as quoted by Porphyry, afiirms that of old every Grecian state made it a rule 
before they marched towards an enemy, to solicit a blessing on their undertak- 
ing by human sacrifice." 

The Romans, the article goes on to say, were not free from 
the rite, for an express law was made against it ; a law which 
does not seem to have been always obeyed. The Gauls and the 
Germans performed the sacrifice in the depths of their woods. 

22 



506 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

The Scythians, the Scandinavians — indeed it proceeds to enu- 
merate every known people. Amongst the nations of Canaan 
their own children were sacrificed. The Hebrew people were 
not untainted with the same rite, though they were probably the 
first who, under the teaching of their great prophets, had risen 
superior to it. But into the development of the Hebrew nation 
— the fiercest in war, and finally the most exalted in religion — 
the writer of the article does not enter. 

"The Carthaginians," he continues, "who were a colony from Tyre, carried 
with them the religion of the mother country. To Kronos (which seems but 
another name for the Moloch of ttie Phenicians, the god of fire and light) they 
offered human sacrifices, and especially the blood of children." 

But I have quoted quite enough. Only to this long catalogue 
I wall add the more modern instances of the Mexicans or the 
Aztecs, amongst whom human sacrifices were frightful from their 
number and the ceremonies that accompanied them. These and 
other cases of savage or semi-barbarian states that have come 
under the notice of the modern observer, throw light on the bar- 
barism of antiquity, and show how close the connection is between 
war and this sanguinary worship. 

I do not pretend to assert that the rite of human sacrifice may 
not have existed in some cases where no pecuhar connection can 
be traced between it and the passion of war. It may have been 
extended, in some instances, from one nation to another by mere 
imitation. It may have been perpetuated by force of custom 
into times comparatively humane ; it may have been revived, in 
other instances, by a noble desire of self-immolation, or self- 
devotion for the common good. But all this does not prevent us 
from seeing, in the universal existence of such a rite, the worship 
of a terrible deity — a fierce, vindictive, destroying Power, whom 
I have not improperly called the god of Terror. Nor can there 
be any doubt that the conception of such a god is mainly owing 
to the passions of war ; for are not men seen to devote, as oifer- 
ings especially due, the captives taken in war, or even to repre- 
sent the very slaughter of their enemies in battles and sieges, as 
an act of sacrifice to their god ? 

The first historic glimpse we catch at man, in any place, at 
any the remotest times, we see him fighting ; he has a spear in 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 507 

his hand. He has indeed first to earn his food, and then to fight 
for the possession of it ; he fights for his hunting-ground, for his 
flock, for his field. It is not flattering, this large share of the com- 
bative spirit of the brute. Nevertheless, it is from this point that 
nature starts towards her upward, human developments. 

With what an averted glance do we already begin to contem- 
plate war ! Already its necessity, though still acknowledged, is 
lamented. A time may come when our posterity shall find it 
difiicult to understand the martial spirit that animates even our 
own day. They will be astonished to think that men of culti- 
vated minds should have trained themselves sedulously for this 
profession of arms, and that thousands of people, withdrawing 
themselves from all handicrafts or useful employments, should 
spend their whole lives in preparation for a day of battle. Yet 
we " relish," as Wordsworth says, 

" Strangely the exasperation of the time. " 

The dangers, and the passions, and the heroism of war, are 
courted, chanted, applauded amongst us. And it is right it 
should be so. War is still inevitable. The advanced nations of 
the earth would be trodden under foot by those less advanced, 
if they were: not as powerful in war as tliey are skilful in the 
arts of peace. 

Every satirist, every moralist, every preacher declaims against 
war. I accept this general denunciation as prophetic that it will 
one day cease. Meanwhile, this most flagrant of our evils, and 
fiercest of our joys, has been our starting-point and stimulant 
along every line of progress you can mention. To war, as I 
have said, we owe the Nation, and without this great union man 
would have remained intellectually a mere dwarf. It gave us 
the city and the empire. Had there been no large assemblage 
of men kept together by the sentiment of a common safety, or a 
common power, there would have been no great enterprise, and 
few great thoughts. The languages of the earth would have 
been innumerable. Each tribe would have spoken its own dia- 
lect, and have been shut up within it. There would have been 
no literature. Had a great mind vaguely bestirred itself, it 
would have been of no avail ; it would have been buried alive in 



508 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

the little village community. But hardly could there have been 
any thing great. Men would never have combined but for some 
quiet domestic purpose, some business of the flock and the farm- 
yard. There would have been no great projects, no great ideas, 
no palaces, no temples, and the gods themselves would have been 
dwarfed into mere household deities, and the patrons of a harvest- 
home. 

How much we owe to war in this province of religion, has not 
been generally perceived, nor the nature of the debt. The pas- 
sions of the combat are so preeminently violent — the fate of 
battles so uncertain — the victory so intensely desired — that war 
could not fail both to promote the worship of the god, and to 
determine the character of the god who was worshipped. It 
intensified religion, which else (except under certain occasional 
circumstances) might have been little better than a poet's dream. 
To estimate its influence here, we must recollect in what ferocious 
spirit war was carried on in earlier times, and what despair it 
entailed upon the vanquished party. War was extermination ; 
and if an enemy was spared, he was enslaved. So ferocious and 
destructive is war in its primitive character, that slavery some- 
times makes its appearance as an intercessor, and the representa- 
tive of clemency. 

Every passion, let it be remembered, shared in by a unani- 
mous society, is supreme — unquestionable— asserts itself in the 
full blaze of day — has no misgivings — needs no vindication — 
asserts and vindicates itself most despotically. These fierce 
vindictive barbarians admire their own unrestricted anger — their 
own unlimited revenge. No idea of the reason has yet been 
developed in them, to interrupt and baulk their passions, and 
bring them back captives to the better thought. They rejoice in 
their angers, and give them frankly and unhesitatingly to their 
god. Delighting above all things in the slaughter of their ene- 
mies, they at once believe that he also delights in his destructive 
■power, in his free unrestricted anger. To them destruction is 
the great manifestation of power. Blood is poured out as an 
acceptable offering. What better could be devised ? Terrible 
is this god even to his worshippers ; not otherwise could he be 
terrible to their enemies. No one knows when his anger may 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 509 

break out. No gentle worship suits either the god or the wor- 
shipper ; no offering of flowers, or the corn-sheaves, not even the 
lamb or the dove will suffice ; the lordly bull is sacrificed ; the 
conquered foe is dragged before the altar, and immolated there. 
If the death of the captive or the slave be too tame a spectacle, 
too sHght a devotion, his worshippers will slay each other before 
him — will fling their own children into the flames to be con- 
sumed before his sight. They too enjoy 

" Strangely the exasperation of the tinae." 

And now, in order to see the importance of this terrible war- 
god, of this enthroned Anger and Terror, we have only to pursue 
the history of mankind to its next stage of civilization. Peace 
begins to dispute the reign of war. Law, Justice, Faith in 
treaties, are the earnest wants of the time. And lo ! the god of 
Terror becomes the god of Justice. To him the scales are given, 
but the terrible sword not withdrawn. To him the office of 
Judge is assigned, but the old anger and terrible vindictiveness 
remain. This last is essential. It is no calm administrator of 
law ; it is the offended Judge that is the terror to evil-doers. 

We mistake the matter entirely if we suppose that men ever 
proceeded at once to form to themselves the conception of a 
Divine Judge administering a law, and dealing out measured 
penalties. Or even that they began by imagining a Judge sim- 
ilar to what would exist amongst themselves in rude times, and 
then modified the character of this Divine Judge, as their own 
ideas of law and jurisprudence advanced. There has been 
always something more than Judge in the popular god that has 
formed the popular conscience. And if there had not been that 
something more, the popular conception would have been un- 
availing for its great purpose. Men would have proceeded to 
measure by anticipation the sentence of the Judge, according 
to their own standard of equity ; and such a sentence, whether 
executed in this world or the next, would have generally had 
but little terror. It is the unlimited anger roused against the 
criminal in the bosom of the Divine Avenger and Judge, that 
has constituted the real terror and available power of religion. 
The god is not the administrator of a law which sets bounds to 



510 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

his punishments ; nor has the criminal merely broken a law and 
incurred a definite penalty ; he has offended the god, and brought 
down an infinite wrath upon his head. And to this very day the 
two elements of thought are constantly combined — of a Judicial 
Power, and of a personally offended Power. No sinner ven- 
tures to measure out his own punishment. There is an infinite 
anger above him. To this day I see a most needful element in 
the conscience, which dates from the war-god of the sacrificial 
period — from the god of arbitrary and terrific Power. 

The belief in some passionless judicial Tribunal, that metes 
out strictly-graduated sentences, is the actual religious faith of 
no class of men. Such judicial Tribunal ethical writers may 
discuss, approving or disapproving, but it does not constitute the 
actual piety of any of their countrymen. 

Other phases of the religion of antiquity may be far more 
agreeable than the one I have been contemplating. Baccha- 
nalian festivals, or a worship conducted with manifestations of 
joy and abandonment to pleasure, may present a much less 
revolting spectacle. And the gathering of people together at 
great holidays had no doubt its good results, keeping the people 
united, and the like. But this holiday aspect of rehgion strikes 
me as comparatively of little importance. It was the god of 
battles, to whom men could give their very lives in self-devotion 
— the god who gave victory, whose rage was equal to his power 
— who could exterminate whole cities — it was this conception 
that, in the modifications it has undergone, has wrought so won- 
drously in human history. This Power became the Divine 
Judge, Lord and Ruler of heaven and earth, and the punisher 
of crime. Suppose men to commence by forming the conception 
of a celestial Judge : they bind his hands at each epoch, by the 
same rules of measured retribution, or requisite penalty, which 
preside over human jurisprudence. The justice of Heaven is 
only a copy of the justice of earth, and so much the less terrific 
as it is more remote in time and place. Suppose them to com- 
mence with some philosophic conception of God, as the benefi- 
cent Creator of mankind — I do not say that this conception is 
inconsistent with the idea of future punishment ; for what is all 
our present life but a series of punishments or penalties, teaching 



THE DEVELOrMENT OF SOCIETY, 511 

US to travel in the right road ? — but men thinking ah initio 
would have found it inconsistent with that idea of future pun- 
ishments which has been so effective on the human mind — the 
irrevocable doom — the penalty still inflicted when there is no 
longer any right road to travel. The guilty man may think his 
remorse eternal, for he does not see the new life that may spring 
from it ; but what spectator would convert this transitory feeling 
of an endless remorse, into a dogmatic article of theology, true 
absolutely for him and for all mankind ? 

It seems to me, therefore, clear, (and I point to it as another 
great instance how one generation prepares for the next,) that a 
given age may obtain, by modification of those ideas which it 
has inherited from its predecessor, a more effective religious 
government than it could have thought out for itself. Humanity 
is, as it were, one life. Men of passion and imagination — men 
full of anger, and praying for the destruction of their enemies, 
enthroned — not without feeling of a fierce cordiality — an infinite 
Anger in the skies. Afterwards the dark and gloomy throne 
was gradually shaped into a Judgment-seat — then into a Mercy- 
seat — but with the old thunders lingering round it still. With- 
out these there would have been no feared judgment, and con- 
sequently no vivid conception of mercy. Love makes its first 
entrance into our hearts under the name of mercy. The new 
Dispensation under which we are said to live, left the old Infinite 
Anger where it was, and brought forward an Infinite Mercy, for 
ever to neutralize it. 

And now does not something like a climax stand out clear 
before us ? For how could this great belief in Mercy, which 
is subduing the human heart to an unutterable tenderness — how 
could it have appeared in the world but for its antecedents — 
the reign of Divine Anger and of Judgment ? The three great 
ideas of Anger, Judgment, and Mercy, are blended together 
most conspicuously in our own faith. 

But there is an idea higher than that of Mercy which has 
entered last of all into the world. The word " Grace " not only 
signifies pardon, but the Spirit of God moving in us to the pro- 
duction of a new life. I hold this word Grace to be one of the 
' noblest, and of fullest significance, that has ever been uttered 



SlSr THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

in popular theology. At this point the highest philosophy- 
appears blent in that twisted cord of reason and imagination 
which binds so many ages together. For is it not indisputably 
true that God, by his free gift, is creating us, age after age, into 
new and higher life, and wiser love to man and to himself? 

" Throw thyself upon the love of God, thy Creator ! " " Per- 
fect love casteth out fear ! " These are the last utterances ot 
religion in the most advanced nations of the earth. Add, too, 
that the perfect love which casteth out fear is the love also ot 
goodness and of man. By no other means will fear be cast out. 
I speak generally of mankind, or of a society. I say the Furies , 
will live for ever in the imagination of guilt or crime. Whether 
the Terror arise spontaneously in our own mind, or descend 
from tradition, from the imagination of other men, the result is 
the same. It has been so ordered by God that there is no 
peace to the heart of man but in the great sentiments of virtue 
and the love of God. If any man holds that a human society — • 
standing where we stand in the progression of ages — can escape 
from the fear of God by any other outlet, he must defend his 
own thesis. I should be a hypocrite, and false to the most irre- 
sistible and ineffaceable sentiments of my own mind, if I taught 
such a doctrine ; for I daily and hourly feel that there can be no 
peace with God unless there is good-will to man, no escape from 
fear but in the sentiments of love and obedience. A people that 
passed from superstition into crime would inevitably return — 
passion-led — back to superstition. 

If here I do not enlarge on the immense value of the teaching 
of Christianity, and especially how it is tending to bring all man- 
kind into feelings of union and a comnion interest, and disposing 
the wealthy to do whatever lies in their power, consistently with 
the stabihty of society, for the welfare of the working classes — 
it is because I should be only repeating what so many others 
have said far more eloquently than I could say it. I would only 
beg of you to bring all that has been said on this topic in juxta- 
position with what has been going on in the world of industry, 
and to note that this teaching, which is approximating all classes 
in spirit, is contemporaneous with those increased powers ot 
production which are extending to all the substantial advantages 
of civilization. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 513 

Contemporaneous also with the general increase of intelligence 
— to which topic I will now betake myself. If some further 
considerations suggest themselves on the great subject of re- 
ligion, they will be better introduced under our next head. 

Section X. — Intellectual or Scientific Progress. 

All knowledge, whether derived from observation of nature, 
or reflection upon ourselves and human society, has its specific 
value, but it is the perception of the laws of nature, the order 
and harmony of all things, the method of creation, as we should 
say, that is, above all, valuable in the education of the human 
race. It is to this I have now more particularly to refer. 

I do not affect the use of technical language, but you will 
bear in mind the meaning here attached to such terms as 
Imagination, Reason, Reflection, and the like, and what has 
been said upon the development of the consciousness. Knowl- 
edge grows either by direct observation of nature, (facts arrang- 
ing themselves in our memory in the relations of succession and 
coexistence in which they had appeared to the senses,) or by the 
intervening aid of the imagination ; that is, new combinations are 
formed of facts or memories, (imaginations,) and by comparing 
these combinations of our own thoughts with nature, new re- 
lationships are observed in nature herself. Our imagination is 
either corrected or dismissed, and conjecture gives place to a 
theor3^ 

The first growths of the human mind, whether they are social 
customs or wild mythologies, are often spoken of as the work of 
Spontaneity ; when they have been modified by experience and 
observation, they are described as the work of Reflection. The 
two words are very convenient, and I adopt them ; only I would 
remark that Spontaneity is but another term for passion and 
imagination, and that, therefore. Spontaneity does not exhaust 
itself in any one product. Spontaneity and Reflection are con- 
tinually going on together. New combinations of thought and 
passion arise in the most advanced minds, though of a different 
character, and these are continually presenting themselves for 
comparison with the knowledge already obtained. 

We must, at the commencement of our career, outrun ex- 

22 * 



514 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

perience by some fanciful conjecture, or we should advance no 
further than the direct teaching of sense and memory. We 
should not make a single experiment if we did not first make 
a conjecture. A man is ill, and you cannot cure him ; nothing 
as yet is known of medicine. And you will never cure, either 
that man or any other, if you wait for knowledge. But, led by 
some fanciful analogy, or capricious combination of ideas, you 
try this thing and that, till something cures, or seems to cure. 
The man is in a burning fever ; you gather cool-looking herbs : 
if the moonlight is falling on them when gathered, will they not 
be still more cooling? You test this and that hypothesis till 
some of nature's hidden relations are brought to light, and a 
truth is acquired. 

If it is not a sick man to cure, but some extraordinary phe- 
nomenon to explain, you have recourse to a similar expedient. 
You conjecture a cause to fill up what seems a gap in the usual 
order of things. If the speculative mind were not to gratify its 
curiosity by this guesswork, the result would be that curiosity 
would die out in the hopeless blank of present ignorance, and 
nothing would be ever learnt. Cosmogonies and astrologies, 
and the like fanciful hypotheses, are the necessary forerunners 
of science. As science advances, the guesswork assumes a very 
different character ; our knowledge, we say, has taught us how 
to conjecture. 

Increase of knowledge is the initiative of all other improve- 
ment. The progress of man includes progress in his aff'ections 
as well as his intellect ; this is, indeed, the most important pro- 
gress of all ; neither can I — an artist — neglect to add that it 
includes progress in all those sentiments of the beautiful, and 
those emotions of pleasure which we embrace under such ex- 
pressions as the love of nature ancl the fine arts. But all our 
affections, desires, and emotions would remain the same from 
generation to generation, (as long as our external world re 
mained the same,) were they not modified by the acquisition of 
new truths or new thoughts. Man set down here, face to face 
with nature, is enabled to understand more and more of God's 
works, and becomes by this intellectual perception a greater 
work himself, as well as a better worker. Moreover, a new 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 515 

world is developed for his study and admiration in his own 
progressive humanity. Human society also presents itself to 
him as a great whole — as a great idea of God — and with this 
peculiarity, that with the knowledge of this whole is necessarily 
thrown upon him the responsibility of so living and so working, 
as, consciously and designedly, to sustain and aid in developing 
this social organism. 

All progress, we say, is traceable to human thought, but it 
does not follow that all progress is the foreseen, intended result 
of this thinking faculty of man. Far from it. His thoughts 
or his inventions, combine with what already is existing of 
thought or invention, and often produce results which the wis- 
dom of no one man had foreseen. The instrument he invents 
for some Hmited purpose, fulfils other purposes he had never 
contemplated. A plan of operations is devised for some sudden 
emergency, and it gives rise to a permanent institution. He 
who invented money was (as Seckendorf says) reorganizing 
society. What remote results are traceable to the printing- 
press and the musket ! From what a limited and partial design 
grew up the system and theory of representative government ! 
In all such cases the active thought of man is the primary move- 
ment, and there is activity enough of human thought in every 
step of the process, but the final or ever-spreading result cannot 
be said to be due to human contrivance. In like manner we 
may notice how, in his speculative and religious systems, the 
thought or imagination of one man, meets and combines with 
the thoughts of other men, and new products ensue, and finally 
there grows up a complicate system which was never originated 
by any one human intellect. 

Looking back at the past history of mankind, one is at first 
somewhat humiliated by observing how little human reason 
has purposely, and with far-stretching thought, accomplished. 
A man puts powder in a tube, and he changes the nature of 
war. Or he calls together a few men to tax themselves and 
their fellow-citizens, and he forms an institution whereby de- 
mocracy becomes possible to a great people. How few great 
results in the social and political world seem to have been 
accomplished knowingly and purposely ! But then, again, this 



516 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

somewhat humiliating thought may well change into a note of 
congratulation, for we see in all this how manifestly progression 
is the divine scheme. Heaven is working with us. And if 
more is done than man had contemplated, the greater accom- 
plishment becomes his own afterwards by voluntary adoption, 
and he works on henceforth with wider knowledge and larger 
purposes. As the plan of the whole develops, it is put (so to 
speak) in the hands of the young created artist, and the creature 
is taught, more and more, to work consciously towards its 
completion. 

Man must live before he retlects on life ; he obeys another 
before he asks himself why he should obey ; he believes before 
he has investigated the grounds of his belief; he has formed 
a social organization before he has contemplated the ends to 
be answered by it. Property springs up, in the first instance, 
from the mere desire to clutch and to keep ; but if there is to 
be any keepiyig, there must be some limit put upon the taking, 
and so a rule gets established. Marriage, at least in its rudest 
form, as the exclusive possession which man, the stronger, keeps 
of one or more of the opposite and weaker sex, waits for no law 
to institute it. Combinations for attack and defence at once 
constitute something of a society, and of a government. What 
is once done, is done again, and custom is the first lawgiver. 
Mere revenge, and sympathy with that revenge, sufiice at first 
to inaugurate some criminal law. In wounding one man you 
may wound two hundred ; the two hundred avenge the injury, 
and make it understood they will act in the same way again. 
So simple and inevitable may be the first step in jurisprudence. 
The formation of society is plainly due to the spontaneous pas- 
sions and actions of individual men ; the harmony of the whole 
was not in the thought of any one of them. A reflective reason 
could not have presided over the origin of society, for Reflection 
must have something to reflect upon. Society must be there 
before examination and comparison of social relations can take 
place. But though Reflection cannot lay the foundation, and 
build the first walls of the social edifice, yet as soon as any 
building at all is erected, it may begin to criticize, to reform, to 
rebuild. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 517 

It is slowly that society may be said to grow completely con- 
scious of itself. Even in the most advanced nations of our 
modern Europe it is only a minority, of whom it may be said 
that they embrace in their reflection the laws and principles of 
the society in which they live. It is a long while since I read 
Rousseau's " Contrat Social ; " but if he really taught that society 
commenced with a deliberate contract or agreement as to the 
terms on which men should live together, it was as bold an 
hypothesis as the speculative mind ever put forth. Such de- 
liberate contract could only take place in advanced communities, 
and has never, in fact, been realized, except in the formation of 
those " societies within a society," such as the Essenes amongst 
the Jews, and the Monks amongst the Christians, and other 
religious men, at various periods, have formed. So far from 
being at the origin of society, such a contract would mark its 
maturity, and would then be only a voluntary adoption, by all 
its members, of the greater part of what already existed amongst 
them. A social contract by which all the adult members of a 
society voluntarily and intelligently bound themselves to certain 
laws for the good of the whole, will be exhibited in that day 
when all men are reflective, and think alike of the good of all. 
To such a result there will, at least, be approximations. Hith- 
erto Reflection has been confined to the Few, but already the 
balance is turning ; let us hope that it may become the habit of 
the Many. 

Section XI. — The Scientijic Method of Thought applied to 

Society. 

When Adam Smith applied a scientific method of thinking to 
the daily industrial and commercial operations of society, and 
wrote his book on the " Wealth of Nations," I am apt to think that 
he did as notable " a stroke of work " as often falls to the lot of 
one man to accomplish. Reflection on society here takes the 
form of science. Facts, which had been looked at apart, or with 
partial and confused relations to each other, are here seen each 
in its place, and forming altogether one harmonious whole. A 
new science, it is very justly said, was founded. 

" You are a bold man," some have said to me, " if, Utopian as 
you are, you invoke the political economist to your aid." 



518 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

I should be a bolder man, and in a very desperate condition, 
if I could not. To the best of my ability I have been a careful 
student of political economy. It seems to me that it would be 
ditiicult to overrate the beneficial effect likely to be produced 
by this study on society at large. By such a study society 
learns to know itself; to know what it has really done, what it is 
really doing. Here it is we learn what the community has un- 
designedly or spontaneously accomplished, — what harmonious 
result has been produced by individual effort pursuing quite 
individual objects. Most curious and unsuspected is the social 
mechanism revealed to us. From spontaneous impulses and 
selfish aims an organization of society has arisen which it is 
most important we should understand. Thus, only, can we 
wisely think for the good of the whole ; thu«, only, can we be 
educated to embrace this whole at all in our minds. 

It has been sometimes said that Political Economy is a foe to 
all enthusiasm, to all generous motives. Wait till its work is 
done. The historian of a future age may have to report that 
this study, more than any other one cause, is educating us for 
the highest of all enthusiasms — desire for the public good. En- 
thusiasm (if we mean by it the capability of acting on some 
great idea which predominates over a sordid selfishness) is the 
highest product of our reason, of our knowledge. I may, indeed, 
know what is good for the whole society, and yet have no desire 
that that good should be realized, but I cannot have the desire 
at all without the knowledge, and happily our minds are so con- 
stituted that, unless some quite personal want or passion has en- 
slaved us to itself, the knowledge of what is good for others will 
be followed by some desire for its accomplishment. 

Look at our own contemporaries, mark how discussions upon 
subjects of political economy are constantly calling forth and 
confirming the mode of reflecting upon society as one organic 
whole. No truth comes out with more distinctness to all minds 
than the reciprocal dependence of class on class. Every indi- 
vidual who knows any thing, knows now that it is impossible to 
separate the interest of one class from another. You may dis- 
member society, but if it is to live and prosper, there must be 
health in every limb. Wealth ceases to be wealth if you have 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 519 

not peace, order, and contentment in the working men ; and all 
organized labour vanishes from the scene if wealth is destroyed. 
Only as an organic whole can we live and advance ; the very 
modifications of our organism are the highest efforts of organic 
life. 

What the political economist reveals to me is the work, you 
say, of Spontaneity. But Reflection has wrought too, and has 
certainly wrought in this revelation of it. And Reflection will 
work on, here and there, at the modification of it. You cannot 
stop one of these workmen more than the other. Reflection 
accepts, rejects, alters. If it contents itself with adopting, as the 
best system, that which the passions of men and their acts of 
untutored, unsystematic judgment had created, this very adoption 
marks an important change in the spirit of society. A new 
spirit has entered into the social organism, which may hence- 
forward exert a plastic power within it. 

Glance now at the state of opinion in England, and say if I 
am fabhng, or dealing with some figment of the imagination, 
when I pronounce that " the good of the whole " has become a 
noble care to very many amongst us. To me, looking abroad 
amongst my contemporaries, nothing so conspicuously character- 
izes our age as the number of noble minds you see in it full of 
the desire to promote the general good. In this habit of think- 
ing for the good of society, you would say, indeed, that most of 
us had become philosophers. Modes of thinking which, in the 
palmy state of Greece, were familiar only to a few men, who 
might have been packed together under a single portico of one 
of their own beautiful temples, are as common amongst us as 
the cries of the market-place. Notice how generally, by rich 
and poor, by learned and simple, the claim is admitted which 
society has on each one of us for his contribution to the public 
good. It is felt that each one of us owes all he has, and all he 
is, to society, and that he is bound to contribute his best of 
labour and intelligence to that organized community which is at 
once result and source of every individual life. That man does 
not belong to our age who does not manifest an extreme re- 
luctance to be included in the category of an idle class. He is 
not idle ! He repudiates the odious distinction. If he does not 



520 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

work with his hands, he manages, he overlooks, he combines the 
labours of others. If he has no land or factory, he makes for 
himself an occupation in some philanthropic scheme. He builds 
a school, or helps to erect a public bath — he collects and dis- 
tributes judiciously the charitable alms of others — he is busy at 
a Savings Bank — he is heart and soul in some Reformatory. 
If he can do nothing else he writes a book. Having nothing to 
give but his ideas, he gives them. And say he has nothing of 
his own to give even here, he can disseminate amongst the many 
the truths of the few. By some plea he escapes the stigma of 
idleness. 

The man of property is heard to avow that he holds his 
wealth as a trust as well as an enjoyment. It is to be enjoyed 
under bond to society. He admits that notwithstanding all his 
muniments and parchments, he has hardly a " good title," unless 
he makes a good use of his property. And the moment he has 
made this admission, his title is felt to be more secure than ever, 
for society is doubly interested in upholding it. See you no 
sign in all this ? Does not wealth grow wiser and more humane, 
just as labour grows less coarse and narrow-minded ? Is it social 
war, or social harmony you would predict ? This is not " organic 
change," but it is something better ; it is the new spirit moving 
in the organism which will effect from within, with peaceful 
growth, what change may be needful. I see in the reflective 
charity which is everywhere exercising itself around me a new 
justice in the making. 

The application of a scientific method to Government, and 
what is especially called Politics, has not been so successful. 
Some few principles have received general acquiescence, as the 
separation of the Administrative from the Legislative functions, 
and the Judicial from both. But if little is finally decided upon 
forms of government, one great truth stands out conspicuous — 
that the stability of every government rests on the acceptance 
by the people (whether by mere habit, or from reflection) of a 
given organization, — on their willingness to act organically. How 
difiicult, it has been said, to get your new constitution to march ! 
The force of habit has not yet bound the people, and they are 
far from having sufficient reflection to put a restraint upon them- 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 521 

selves. Although the very constitution they desired has been 
proclaimed, they persist in acting inorganically. If, when a 
legislative assembly has been formed, the Plehs will look in to 
see that it votes according to their judgment ; if, when judicial tri- 
bunals have been established, the Plehs will extemporize other 
tribunals of their own, — there is an end to government. It is 
an organized people that a politician can alone respect, — it is the 
only " people " he knows ; an inorganic mass is to him a mere 
human chaos ; although he, too, must, of course, admit that there 
are times when organic forms are rudely thrown aside, and there 
can be no appeal but to the unfettered reason, or the unfettered 
passions of mankind. Here is the great advantage of what we 
call a constitutional government, that it enables organic changes 
to be organically made. 

It would be very unprofitable to enter into any discussion on 
forms of government, as the Monarchy, the Republic, the De- 
mocracy. Let us say generally, that in proportion as a people 
rejlectively accept and submit to a given organization have they 
risen in the scale of intelligence, and of political morality. In a 
Democracy it is not enough that the minority have learnt to re- 
spect the majority, but the majority must respect the minority, 
whenever this last appeals to certain fundamental principles of 
jurisprudence or government. In other words, the majority 
must accept such fundamental principles as a restraint upon 
their own will. This at once indicates how high a moral dis- 
cipline such a form of government both promotes and requires. 
Our sentiment of the good of the whole is nowhere more indis- 
pensable. 

How far a scientific spirit has influenced Jurisprudence in 
England, I must leave for the student of our laws to determine. 
One may safely say that throughout society at large, right views 
of jurisprudence are so far entertained, that no extraneous or 
superstitious motives are required for the support of law. Laws 
are understood as rules to be obeyed by all for the good of all. 
In that spirit men make them, and obey them. Time was when 
the people were compelled into obedience by force, or by super- 
stition. Mankind has lived longer, has had more experience, and 
has learnt to honour law for its own sake. 



522- THE DEVELOPMEJ^T OF SOCIETY. 

The retention of the oath in our courts of justice does not 
speak well either for an intelligent morality, or intelligent re- 
ligion. What duty more stringent than to give true evidence in 
a court of justice, and what superstition more flagrant than to 
imagine that it can be rendered more or less stringent, either as 
a moral or religious duty, by making, or omitting to make, some 
ceremonial appeal to God ? In one point of view this judicial 
oath is an instructive relic of the past ; and those who think it 
necessary still to retain it, regard it as belonging essentially to a 
past epoch, and only postpone its dismissal. 

With regard especially to criminal law, one may remark that 
it is but a small proportion of the people (large enough, however, 
to be terribly mischievous) who require to be restrained from theft 
or murder by the punishments affixed to such crimes. If all 
punishments w^ere abrogated, and a code of laws simply pro- 
claimed, the greater number of people would be as little dis- 
posed to commit these crimes as they are now. To well-regulated 
minds a great crime is itself the terrible example. They are 
struck with horror at the idea that ungoverned passions may 
lead to such an act. 

Section XII. — Education of the People. 

Here, as well as anywhere, one may interpose a word upon 
the education of the people. 

The value of education to the person himself, and how, in 
general, it must teach prudence and foresight, wherever there 
is any opportunity for their exercise, I need not touch upon. 
It is too well understood. But how the education of a class 
hitherto left much in ignorance, will act upon the whole of 
society, on the already educated, as well as the newly educated, 
is not perhaps so generally understood. 

In government or religion, that alone can be adopted for all 
which is fitted for the greater number. The higher forms of 
civil government, the higher forms of the religious sentiment, 
are forbidden to the few, while they remain utterly inappro- 
priate to the multitude. Educate the multitude, and the whole 
can rise much higher than what is now the educated part of 
society can rise. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 'OZ^ 

In the search for speculative or philosophic truth, the inquirer 
is often painfully embarrassed by a conflict between what seems 
true, and what seems the most expedient belief. Every earnest 
thinker finds two very different questions intermingling with 
each other — is this true ? is it expedient that it should be taught ? 
— expedient that it should be believed by an order of men ex- 
posed to other temptations than I am, and who, being less in- 
structed, will not see all the truths I see, and on whom, therefore, 
this truth may work like a mischievous error ? The intermingling 
of these two questions not only embarrasses the inquirer as to 
what he shall teach, but as to what he himself shall adopt as his 
own ultimate conclusion. For where he cannot find the truth 
to be expedient, he very naturally, and almost laudably, makes 
efiort with himself to believe that what is most expedient is the 
truth. 

You will remember with what a merciless energy Seckendorf 
used to bring forward against our hopes of progress, that diver- 
sity of speculative opinion which seems to extend even as thought 
and education extend. I myself have sometimes contemplated 
with dismay that seemingly incurable contrariety of opinions, 
which perhaps our very latest and best writers are exhibiting 
before us. Two men, equally celebrated for knowledge, for in- 
tellectual power, for zeal in the public service, shall put forth on 
politics, on religion, on every great subject that concerns society, 
the most opposite tenets. Yet surely Nature and Human Nature 
present the same objects of study to both. Whence this diver- 
sity ? Partial knowledge, you will say, and error, which is the 
fate of all ; and you will add, that as long as there is room for an 
erroneous judgment, there will be diversity of opinion. But yet 
there is another cause which operates most powerfully in per- 
petuating this diversity, and retarding the general acceptance of 
discoverable truths. 

The very best men are precisely those who cannot think for 
truth alone, for truth only for their own minds ; they are con- 
cerned for other men, for the public good, and what is best to be 
thought by all. Thus there comes before them one of those 
questions on which they can attain to no certainty — the precise 
condition and requirements of other men's minds. Most disputes 



524 THE DEVELOPMENT OE SOCIETY. 

resolve themselves into some different estimation of the wants 
and the intelligence of a vague multitude. Listen to two dis- 
putants, discussing forms of government, or articles of faith, you 
will hear reference made at every -turn of the debate to that un~ 
reflective multitude without, who are supposed to be less wise 
than the disputants themselves, but how much less wise there is 
no determining. The reference, you will say, is perfectly legiti- 
mate in a question of politics, because the condition, knowledge, 
and temper of the multitude, enter as very elements into any de- 
bate upon government, but it is out of place in a discussion upon 
the truths of religion. But religion is one form of the govern- 
ment of men ; you cannot divest it of this character ; and you 
cannot help endeavouring to harmonize, as you proceed, the true 
with the expedient. Half the men who discuss the subject of 
religion are thinking less of what must be eternally true, than of 
what is the best belief for society. 

'' Yes ! if men were other than they are ! " is an exclamation 
which terminates many a debate. Well, men will be other than 
they are. If education and prosperity advance amongst the- 
working classes, there will not be this ignorant, and needy, and 
too tempted multitude to think for. There will everywhere be 
men as wise, as rational, and as happily circumstanced, as the 
disputants themselves. That condition of their agreement which 
seemed impossible, has been realized ; men are changed. Is it 
not evident that, such being the case, many of our old debates 
will be put on quite a new footing ? The conflict between truth 
and expediency will be over. At all events, one truth must 
suffice for all. There can be no more virtuous hypocrisies. 
A whole people cannot dissemble. A silent but not unimportant 
revolution will have taken place in every college, in every lec- 
ture room, in every study, in the inmost recesses of every mind. 

All society must advance, in order that any one class may 
reach its highest possible development. . It seems that it never is 
allowed for any one little group or knot of men to rest content 
with their own isolated position. Such is not nature's plan. 
Whether we look to the health of a man, or the wisdom of a 
man, we find that it is not permitted him to be well, or wise, 
alone. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 525 

Our Dives — I have sometimes said to myself — is no bad man. 
He is charitable. What if he encloses his mansion and his 
pleasant grounds within high walls, and thus seems to remove 
himself entirely from the squalid poverty without — he surely must 
have quiet and cleanliness, pure air and freedom from loathsome 
sights. Those hovels outside his garden walls would be misera- 
ble things to look at, and would otfend all senses at once. He is 
distressed that such things should be ; but he cannot rebuild the 
whole village, and if he did, he must add thereto the remodelling 
of the habits of all the villagers. He must interpose between 
him and them that screen of beautiful trees, which are preserved 
by his protection, and which are not preserved for his pleasure 
only. Even the eloquent preacher who, Sunday after Sunday, 
collects both rich and poor under the same sacred roof, can sug- 
gest no remedy — suggests only palliatives — charity to the one 
party, and patience to the other. He sees that to destroy alto- 
gether the condition of Dives, by calling on him for an unbounded 
charity — to give all to the poor — would be simply to reduce us 
all to one barbarous level of poverty and ignorance. The exist- 
ing plan must remain, we must be content with palliatives. 

But nature is not content with our palliatives. The rich man 
may be blameless, and the eloquent and the wise may have done 
all they could ; nevertheless, nature makes her protest. Out 
breaks the plague ! It comes from those hovels, and from the 
stagnant pool that lies amongst them, but it sweeps over the gar- 
den wall of the refined patrician ; it traverses those pleasant 
grounds, enters the chambers of that spacious mansion, and the 
dear child of the house lies stricken by it. Typhus and other 
fevers will not always stay in the hovels in which they are 
bred. 

Those hovels should have been rebuilt ; that stagnant pool 
that lies amongst them should have been drained. By whom ? 
It should have been done ! But who was to do it ? It should 
have been done ! Such inexorable protest is nature accustomed 
to make. 

And as with health of body, so with health of mind. Look 
narrowly into it. The intellectual Dives would shut himself up 
in the pleasant gasrden of his own thoughts — pleasant garden, 



526 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

walled round from the turbulent passions, the superstitions, and 
the panic terror of mankind — open only to the calm and glorious 
heavens. All in vain. Those panic terrors leap his walls, and 
enter every chamber of his house, every chamber of his thoughts. 
They were bred in that crime, and ignorance, and suffering, that 
lies weltering there without ; but they do not stay where they 
are bred — they walk abroad through the minds of all men. That 
swamp of ignorance and vice should have been drained. By 
whom ? It should have been done ! This is the only answer 
that you get. There is no perfect immunity to any man, from 
any kind of pestilence, till the whole city is taken care of. 

Section XIII. — Science and Religion. 

It often happens that in a sketch of this description, the most 
important of all truths occupies the least space in its enunciation, 
because it is familiar to every educated person. In our own age 
it seems unnecessary to dwell on the laws and invariable order of 
nature — or, in other words, on the unity of design and harmo- 
nious action of the Creative Being. That God acts by general 
laws, and not by sudden impulses, as of a human will or passion, 
and that what we call laws of nature are but the " varied action 
of the God," is almost a truism with men of reflection. Yet the 
recognition of this truth constitutes the greatest revolution that 
has taken place in the mind, or history, of man. It is a revolu- 
tion that may be more fitly described as still taking place, for the 
truth, in all its great significance, and with its full legitimate re- 
sults, wins its way very slowly over the multitude. From the 
earliest period in which science, or a scientific observation, makes 
its appearance — from the earliest period to which the literary 
history of the human race extends — this revolution may be said 
to have been taking place, and it is not yet accomplished. 

When speaking of the earlier periods of human progress, we 
found that the greatest ideas of the epoch were enunciated by 
a priesthood, and made, through the instrumentality of imagina- 
tive faiths, to rule over the people. As we approach to epochs 
nearer our own, we find that a priesthood becomes fixed and 
stationary in its intellectual position. That very appeal to a 
divine origin for its ideas, for its books, for its forms of worship, 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 527 

which gave to all these a supernatural authority, becomes a 
chain and fetter on the mind of the priest himself. In fact, the 
priesthood has debarred itself from free inquiry, and bound itself 
to some system of ideas, by those very means it adopted (whether 
altogether designedly or not) to secure for these ideas an author- 
ity over other men. But the spirit of inquiry has not therefore 
deserted the world ; it rises outside the priesthood, and often in 
opposition to it. The philosopher now teaches, the philosopher 
is now the latest inspired of God, though he claims no espe- 
cial authority, but simply invites others to look for themselves, 
and say if they do not see things as he has been enabled to see 
them. In Greece, a Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle, are contem- 
plating nature, and that greater creation, their own minds, and 
are teaching a purer Theism, truer and more sublime doctrines 
of God and the relation between God and man, than are dreamt 
of in the temples of Jupiter and Apollo. These men, however, 
cannot rule the multitude ; and the ideas they put forth, though 
extending over the cultivated minds of Greece and Rome, must 
wait for such dominant position as they can assume, till the 
temple of Apollo is substituted by a far more spiritual Church. 

There rises up from time to time the great Religious Re- 
former, who, supported by faiths which he has in common with 
the priesthood and the people, introduces, through much oppo- 
sition, and by means perhaps of his own martyrdom, some modi- 
fication of the national religion which approximates it to that 
growing intelligence, and those advanced sentiments, that had 
been making their way through philosophic inquiry. In India 
and Persia we have vague accounts of such religious reformers 
in a Buddha, or a Zoroaster. Amongst the Jews and the people 
of Arabia we have still better opportunities of studying such 
religious movements. 

Looking backwards and forwards, along the whole line, as far 
as we can trace or anticipate it, of human development, there is 
nothing to be compared, for grandeur or importance, to the 
development of this idea of the order and unity that exists in 
nature, and the belief that this order and unity represent to us 
the action and power of God. On this blade of grass before me 
all the powers of nature seem to have been expended. This 



528 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

which I call an individual thing, an individual life, and which I 
trace at first so complacently to the seed in the ground, is the 
creation of earth and water, air and light. The cause of it is no 
other than all this varied planet, this planet and its sun. The 
whole, or, in other words, the Divine Idea of the whole, is the 
only cause you can assign. But it is evident that the human 
intellect had to work its way upward, through much varied 
knowledge, to obtain this point of view. Here and there a few 
may have anticipated it at a very early epoch ; but, speaking gen- 
erally of human society, even at the present epoch, that mode of 
thinking which represents the Deity as acting through universal 
laws, and developing thus one divine multifarious whole, has 
still to struggle for its legitimate ascendancy. The earlier way 
of representing the action of the god, as abrupt voluntary act, 
often in contradiction to the laws of nature, still disputes its 
supremacy. 

It is, however, already so well established in men of scientific 
culture, that they do not feel they have any longer to contend 
for it, but, for their own parts, they, as from a secure position, 
can look back with interest and impartiality upon earlier modes 
of representing the Divine Power. They see that these were 
appropriate to the epoch in which they rose ; that they fostered 
sentiments of piety, and provoked to further inquiry. It is pre- 
cisely the scientific age that can do full justice to an imaginative 
age. Perhaps there is nothing which more advantageously dis- 
tinguishes the philosophy of the nineteenth century, than its 
due appreciation and searching analysis of those imaginations, 
those legends, or those myths, which enter so much into 
the first histories, and early religions of mankind. In the 
eighteenth century the philosophical party (by such name we 
must call them, without implying by the name that they had a 
monopoly of philosophy,) satisfied themselves with detecting the 
work of imagination in much that had assumed the place of fact, 
in both sacred anfl profane history. It was only the imagination 
that had given rise to such and such legends, such prodigies in 
nature, such miracles of heroism. But the men of the nine- 
teenth century have studied with respect this phase of human 
thought. They have seen noble sentiments, and great truths 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 529 

dimly perceived, expressing themselves in the legend or the 
myth. Only the imagination ! But let us study, they have said, 
the creature who imagines thus. There must be some law of 
his progressive nature revealed to us in this universality of his 
imaginations. 

I have attempted to show how the path to truth lies neces- 
sarily through error. Before science had been at all developed, 
and before men had a past history of their own species, by the 
light of which to recognize their own position in the great drama 
of life, neither nature, nor human nature, could interest in their 
commonplace aspect. The marvellous commonplace of this 
world could not have been perceived. But the imagination 
framed marvels of its own, which at once startled men from their 
apathetic indifference. They looked around at nature, and saw it 
full of supernatural beings, working their own unquestioned will ; 
they looked back into the shadowy past, and laid the commence- 
ment of a real history in a hypothetical one, in which gods and 
men are mingled together. I speak of the great office of the 
imagination ; you will not so far misinterpret me as to suppose 
that I should say of every imagination, or of every error, that it 
had its recognizable use, or led us forward in any perceptible 
way on our progressive career. On the contrary, many errors 
have been manifestly and altogether of a most debasing and de- 
grading nature ; as when the symbol of the wiser man becomes 
the very object of worship of the ignorant man ; or some story 
wrought perhaps out of astronomical figures, signs of the zodiac, 
and the like, becomes transmuted into a sacred history, in which 
both common sense and morality are utterly disregarded. Ani- 
mal worship and image worship, or idolatry, seem so far from 
helping us forward, that they wear the aspect of a downward 
course, the forsaking of a thought for an object of sense ; though 
in reality those who worshipped, like children, the mere idol, 
never rose into thought, but had remained children all their 
lives. 

" Fancy, what au age was that for song ! 
That age when not by laws inanimate 
As men believed, the waters were impeli'd, 
The air control!' d, the stars their courses held; 



530 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

Biit element and orb on acts did wait, 

Of Powers endued with visible form, instinct 

With will " 

So sings our poet Wordsworth, and describes as accurately as 
more prosaic language could do, that early or imaginative stage 
of thought which we contrast with the later or scientific. By 
acts ! not by laivs 1 the elder gods ruled ; that is, by uncon- 
nected acts, not by those systematic acts we call laws. To the 
human being, his own passions, his own thoughts, start into ex- 
istence without any known antecedent (there can be no trace in 
the consciousness of mere physical or any unconscious antece- 
dents) ; he takes this type of sudden, partial, impetuous action, 
and applies it to his god, or to the events of nature seen as the 
doing of a god. 

Our precise definition of a miracle, as an interference with, 
or suspension of, the laws of nature, could not be present to 
an age that had little idea at all of laws of nature. Some acts 
of the god would be more wonderful and extraordinary than 
others ; but all that was attributed to him would alike ema- 
nate as from some human will that had an illimitable power. 
There would be no grounds for restricting that power. Every 
act would at least be a special providence. To disbelieve in 
special interpositions of divine power, would be tantamount to 
atheism, because only in such interpositions did the god reveal 
himself. 

In the miracles and wonders attributed to the god, there would 
be no distinction drawn between what, in the nature of things, is 
possible and impossible. The logic of those times would be very 
short : What I can wish, a god can wish ; and what a god wishes, 
he can accomplish. 

Take the three following cases. 1. A man is saved from ship- 
wreck by the sudden subsidence of the wind that was driving 
him on a lee-shore, and he presents his votive offering to Nep- 
tune, reporting himself to be saved by the direct interposition ot 
the god. 2. Some wretch has committed sacrilege, and the earth 
is reported to have opened and swallowed him up. 3. Some 
mortal favoured of the gods has been known to be in two places 
at once, as was reported of ApoUonius of Tyana. Now, in the 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 531 

first case, the event is according to the laws of nature, but in- 
terpreted into a special act of favour. The second case is that 
which we should call a miracle ; it is an event which we cannot 
pronounce to be impossible, but not being embraced in the known 
order of nature, we should require for it a peculiarly stringent 
evidence. The third case is a simple impossibility, and no human 
testimony could avail any thing except to prove that somebody's 
senses had been deceived. Yet I apprehend that in a rude age 
these distinctions would not be perceived. There would be a 
gradation of wonder and amazement, but all the three reports 
would be received on much the same evidence or testimony. 

No fanciful idea has been more popular than that of being 
transported instantaneously from one spot to another without 
passing through the intermediate space, and in defiance of all 
material obstacles, such as bolts, and bars, and walls of stone. 
We wish to be transported this- moment into a room some hun- 
dreds of miles off, where dear friends are sitting. Place us, oh 
magician, in the midst of them in spite of doors and locks, and 
this odious interval of space ! We do not consider what sort of 
task we impose upon the magician, we think of nothing but our 
wish. A solid body cannot pass from one place to another with- 
out traversing the intermediate space. It must cease to have 
the property of solidity, or of space-occupancy ; it must cease to 
be matter at all — it must cease to have motion at all — if it could 
move without passing through space. It is utter nonsense. It 
is the same kind of contradiction as to say of a given body that 
it could be at the same time a square and a circle. The only 
way in which the magician could perform, or rather seem to 
perform, the feat, would be by annihilating us here where we 
stand, and recreating us there where we wish to be. Or, if we 
give up the point of not traversing the intermediate space, but 
only insist that he should convey us through closed doors and 
solid walls, then, by some process of sublimation, the magician 
must so vaporize this too solid flesh, as to reduce our bodies to 
elementary particles of matter, minute enough to pass through 
such substances as wood or stone, and conveying these particles 
with the rapidity of electricity to the destined spot, he must there 
put them together again — flesh and bones, and the running blood 



532 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

— in the same form as that in which they exist at present. But 
of the many inventors of the many legends in which this sort of 
miracle is performed, who ever troubled himself with all these 
difficulties ? The wish is omnipotent in the realm of fancy, and 
when it is a god whom we have made our magician, it would 
be a sort of impiety to doubt the possibility of any wish being 
accomplished. It is not felt that creative Reason, and creative 
Power, are inseparable. 

It is indispensable for the student of history distinctly to per- 
ceive that, owing to the power of forming new combinations of 
our ideas — new combinations which have no counterpart in 
reality — a power, as we have seen, so essential to human prog- 
ress — the marvellous story, the prodigy, and the miracle must 
arise. It is quite a normal creation of the human mind in one 
stage of its progress. How one marvellous story begets another, 
how often it is repeated with additions and alterations, no one 
thinks of denying. A prevailing belief in such stories is sure to 
bring forward new stories of the same kind. But you sometimes 
meet with people who say — " Yet surely there must have been 
such things at one time, or how account for that prevailing belief 
which has been the fruitful source of so many fables ? " Such 
persons have not clearly represented to themselves the creative 
power of the imagination. 

A prevailing belief in witchcraft has brought forward such 
stories of witchcraft, uttered with such confidence of assertion, 
and supported by such delusions in the poor witches themselves, 
that courts of law, and that not in an altogether uncivilized 
period, have punished the supposed crime with death. Yet, in 
this age, if any one should urge upon us that there surely must 
have been some real witchcraft, either then or at a previous 
time, to account for this prevailing belief, we should reply, That 
a belief in witchcraft manifestly arose — not from a series of 
accurate observations on the effects of charms and incantations — 
but from fanciful suppositions, at once connecting certain evils, 
whose origin was unknown, with certain malicious operations 
attributed to some fellow-man. In Christian Naples there still 
exists amongst the populace, and amongst more than the popu- 
lace, the pagan faith in the " evil eye." Go farther East and 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 533 

you find the mother dressing her child in dirty rags that it may 
not attract the passing gaze of the stranger. A folly like this 
can live and thus perpetuate itself. Yet it surely never rose 
from any exact observation, tracing a connection between the 
look of a stranger, and the sickness of a child. 

Take the #iore classic instance of divination, and of oracles. 
How manifestly here the desire created the faith ! What desire 
in mortal man more strong, till it is checked by reflection, than 
to know the future — the success of his present enterprise — the 
fate of the coming battle ? Will the victory be ours if we fight ? 
The gods know, and the priest who is in communication with 
the gods could learn. The priest is asked, till he is compelled 
to give an answer. Whatever advantage he may afterwards 
have taken of this faith in divination, or prophecy, it was not he 
who first, or exclusively originated it. A universal desire origi- 
nates a universal faith, and generation after generation of man- 
kind passes, and no nation goes to war without consulting the 
oracle. Yet at length the oracles become mute, and all men now 
resolve them into craft and delusion. 

I would observe that it is the disconnection of any given event 
of nature, or act of the creative Power, from its antecedents and 
consequents, that is the essential distinction of the older and 
imaginative mode of thinking. It is this unconnected act which 
the theologian of ancient times delighted to contemplate, and 
which the theologian of a scientific age finds it almost impossible 
to conceive. If a criminal is represented as being struck dead 
by a flash of lightning, sent or created for the express purpose — 
this would be to the scientific man just as difficult a conception 
as if the earth were represented as suddenly opening to engulf 
the same criminal. He would have no difficulty in beheving the 
fact that the criminal was struck by lightning, and might doubt 
the report of his being swallowed up by the earth ; but if he is 
called upon to believe that the lightning which struck the crim- 
inal was altogether unconnected with the electric state of the 
atmosphere and of the earth — was an unconnected and sudden 
creation — he is as much embarrassed, and as completely thrown 
out of his usual mode of thinking, as if you required him to 
, believe that without any earthquake, or any volcanic movement, 



534 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

the earth suddenly disclosed a chasm under the footsteps of the 
guilty man. 

So rooted in the minds of scientific men is this belief in the 
connectedness of the phenomena of nature, and their formation 
of one harmonious scheme, that I doubt whether, if a miracle 
were really wrought before their eyes, they wo^ld believe it 
as a miracle. They would suspect that their own limited 
knowledge of nature gave to the fact the anomalous appearance 
which it wore to them. If a veritable Midas were to present 
himself before them, who, by his touch, turned all substances 
into gold, they would no sooner have satisfied themselves of the 
fact, than they would begin to speculate whether this might not 
be an exalted condition of some property possessed, in a less 
degree, by other bodies. The chemists would not rest content 
till they had analyzed this Midas himself; they would pass 
every morsel of him through the crucible, apply every conceiv- 
able test to every tissue of his body, before they relinquished all 
hope of discovering the secret of this transmutation of metals — 
of connecting, in short, this novelty with the already known 
phenomena of nature. 

"With us there is but one miracle, and that is the whole crea- 
tion. God acts in all, and all his acts necessarily harmonize. 
Order and harmony are essential to every existence we can 
conceive of. The miracle, as vulgarly understood, would be 
but chaos, contradiction, mere destruction. But you see directly 
that the greatest revolution that has taken place in the human 
mind must be also one of the slowest and most gradual. You 
see directly that the two modes of representing to ourselves the 
action of the Deity, though essentially contradictory and incon- 
sistent, would nevertheless coexist for centuries, and often in the 
same minds. You see directly that, after admitting that God 
acts in the very order of nature, men would still, wherever they 
could not see the order, revert to their old conception of arbi- 
trary and unconnected action. You see directly that after 
admitting there are miracles noio, they would still cling to the 
wonderful stories of the past, which have come down to them 
with all the confidence of human assertion, and are mingled up, 
perhaps, with grand sentiments and vital truths. The transition ^ 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 535 

is slow from the imaginative to the scientific period. Perhaps 
in religion some floating relic of the imagination will be always 
with us. Men cannot look upon the sun itself; and the bright- 
est part of the firmament on which they can rest their eyes are 
those pinnacles of the topmost cloud, where the light seems to 
be made palpable to us by that earth-born vapour which inter- 
poses between us and it. 

Does it not seem to you that the great miracle of Creation 
leaves no room for any other miracle ? New acts of Divine 
Power must surely be in harmony with the old. As for me, I 
find in the contemplation of any single atom of matter, in its 
single property of space-occupancy, a mystery and a wonder 
far greater than any transmutation of metals, or any magical 
changes, that have ever been imagined. I feel the power of 
the incomprehensible God in every grain of dust that holds 
itself thus potently in space. It is a childish blunder that dis- 
esteems the palpable substance, and tries to take refuge in thin 
etherialities, and ghostly essences. Your etherealities are near 
akin to nothing. The great wonder is the coming forth of the 
palpable in space. Look how the blank air is substituted by 
the oak and the cedar. Out of impalpable ethers comes forth 
this creation to fill the sky with beauty. What are your ghostly 
essences to this ? That which we call inanimate nature is itself 
no other than a most wonderful organism ; for what is this fine 
balance and reciprocal action of solid and fluid, the vapour and 
the gas, but a great organic whole ? I need no other mystery 
than that of all creation. I look from the moss at my feet to 
that sun above — that great star — with which its life is so singu- 
larly blended — and find rest for my mind only in the contempla- 
tion of the whole as it exists in the Divine Idea. 

And does it not seem to you that this relationship of Creator 
and Creature must be more and more felt, and that, as it aggran- 
dizes, it absorbs to itself other religious sentiments, or gives 
them a new character, and itself takes its place at the very head 
of all human life ? Gratitude, in the first instance, was allied 
*with the supposition that God acts by special interposition ; but 
this is only an accidental association, it is not essential to the 
sentiment of gratitude. I must surely feel peculiarly thankful 



536 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

for this great gift of life at a moment when I have been saved 
from shipwreck, but I need not think, in order to have this sen- 
timent of gratitude, that the wind had ceased to blow, or had 
changed its direction, especially for my preservation. My very 
gratitude is this, that I am still one of that living race for whom 
all winds are blowing, and all nature's powers are in ceaseless 
exercise. That man never felt the sentiment of gratitude at 
all, who would not feel it preeminently on a day of battle, when 
he had been "under fire" and had escaped; yet it would be a 
most egotistical method of thinking, to suppose that the bullet 
had an especial direction which missed him, and struck another. 
The God of Science — the God of the Conscience — these two 
have been set in opposition by some ; but other and better men 
have shown triumphantly that there is no opposition between them. 
I put it thus : Let any man be first familiarized with this rela- 
tionship of Creator and Creature, and then let him turn an intro- 
spective glance upon himself. He sees that the idea of the good 
of the whole, which is developed in his intelligence, and which 
all progressive movements tend to develop with more and more 
prominence, can be no other than a partial reflex of the divine 
idea itself He feels that, in addition to that obedience to his 
own reason, which is exacted in every case, and which is founded 
on the very nature of reason itself — he obeys the especial com- 
mand and instruction of God when he acts in conformity to this 
idea of the good of the whole. And it is impossible for the 
cultivated mind — for the mind in which the ideas of God and 
goodness are once developed — to transgress, through any fit of 
passion, this command of God and the reason, without feeling a 
trouble, a disquiet, and remorse, which nothing but a return to 
obedience can allay. If such a one believes in a future state, 
this trouble of the mind will produce none but gloomy anticipa- 
tions while it lasts ; this trouble, at all events, he must carry 
with him to that future state. God's law will be fulfilled there, 
if not here. For such a man there is, in this world, no peace 
but in virtue. He cannot go back, if he would, to the state of 
the savage, or the utterly ignorant man ; and if he could, he* 
would then meet the old Furies on his path. They, too, would 
have revived. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 537 

The idea of an approving and disapproving God who sees our 
thoughts — idea ever growing on us as our thoughts become 
grander and wiser— is this a conception which Humanity, hav- 
ing once seized, will ever relinquish ? Never ! never ! I see 
this conception growing clearer and more influential during the 
past progress of religion, and I can confidently predict, from the 
very nature of our development, that it will grow still clearer 
and still more potential over us. To live serenely, as in the 
presence and under the eye of God, becomes the condition of 
happiness for every cultivated mind. 

We live, and must always live, under the government of God. 
But we get clearer ideas of the nature of that government. The 
following illustration occurred to me as I was sketching the 
other day some of these classic ruins in the neighbourhood. 
Bring before you the beautiful portico of a Grecian temple. 
You see first the tall and upright pillars, resting on the solid 
earth ; these shall typify for us morality. Superimposed on 
these, you have the entablature, with its glorious pediment, 
where the gods are seen lying in watchful and meditative repose. 
Our pillars uphold this pediment, these gods, and yet remove 
from them their sacred burden, and the pillars themselves, 
marble though they are, and though they rest upon the solid 
earth, will strew the ground with ruins. Here and there a 
broken shaft is all that will remain. Thus the earth-supported 
columns are also sustained by pressure from above. Not always 
does the same god, or the same representation of the god, repose 
above the portico. In that sculpture the world has marvellously 
advanced. 

I have said that as we become reflective, the plan of human 
society is, as it were, put into our own hands, we have to work 
it out consciously. Man cannot free himself from this noble 
responsibility, except by going back into savage ignorance. Not 
his to distribute, as Imlac the sage had brought himself to fancy, 
rain and sunshine on the earth, but it has becorae- his to help in 
the distribution of human griefs and human joys. This is a 
responsibility both to God and man ; it is a responsibility, bear 
in mind, which all enforce on each, by the influence of public 
opinion. 



538 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

I like that passage, Thorndale, in your Diary, (and I will 
conclude this section with it,) where you say : — 

" God never pardons ; His laws are irrevocable, the mind that 
deserts its better knowledge must suffer." 

" God always pardons ; for remorse is penitence, and penitence 
is new life, and returning peace." 

Conclusion, 

" Of what use," I am sometimes asked — " of what use to dis- 
quiet ourselves with speculations upon a future which we shall 
none of us see, which few of us, and that in a very indirect 
manner, can in any way promote ? " I answer that this faith in 
the future makes to me the present intelligible, and that it serves 
as my guide in deciding many a question of the day on which 
an opinion must be formed. I answer that a faith in the future 
is one element of power by which a happy futurity will be real- 
ized. I answer that, if we have no faith in a higher condition 
of society than that hitherto attained, we must tremble at every 
thing which tends to alter or subvert that condition, we must be 
conservatives in that narrow and repressive sense of the term 
when men are solicitous to preserve every thing, good, bad, and 
indifferent, true or false, in the state in which it is, because they 
are sure that any one alteration will introduce some other altera- 
tion, and they have no hope in any condition, better, on the 
whole, than the present. A man who does not believe in progress 
must tremble at the advance of truth, he must look with distrust 
at the increasing prosperity and intelligence of the working- 
classes, for all these are causes of change. Such a one has no 
confidence in the great laws of human development ; he trusts to 
the accidents of time and place, or what seem such to him ; he 
hangs every thing on some one form of government, or some one 
form of religion, and these he does not recognize as resulting 
from the normal activities of our common Humanity, but as 
providential incidents which cannot be explained by, or cannot 
be embraced in, the general laws of human development. 

I answer, moreover, that this belief in the future is part of my 
religion, for it exalts to me the sublime relationship of Creator 
and Creature. It explains to me (so far as we explain any 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 539 

thing) the appearance of what we must call evil in this world. 
The great and perfect whole of Humanity is destined to be de- 
veloped progressively. Why such a creation at all as a progres- 
sive Humanity should make its appearance, is a question, I 
certainly do not pretend to answer, and should think it not very 
wise to ask. But once having recognized the progressive nature 
of man, and of all creation so far as we know it, we see that what 
(looked at by itself) seemed an evil, or an imperfection, assumes 
a very different aspect when looked at in relation to the whole. 
I cannot doubt that if we could extend our vision over the past, 
the present, and the future, we should see as complete and as 
marvellous a unity of design in the progress of humanity, as 
science appears to have detected in the progressive stages in the 
formation of our globe. In every part of our planet we trace 
the same law or method of progressive creation. If any one 
could have seen the earth at a time when it is supposed that vol- 
canic action was much more frequent than it is now, he would 
have had the impression that it was merely a most turbulent 
scene. That volcanic action was throwing up the mountains, 
from which were to descend the fertilizing streams into peaceful 
valleys. Wars and superstitions, though not amiable subjects of 
contemplation, have prepared the way for civilization and relig- 
ion. And let it be borne in mind that those who hved in the more 
turbulent eras of human existence, had not the sense of evil and 
of moral evil that we have ; whilst that we have this finer sense 
of moral evil, and look back upon their epoch with some dismay, 
is the strongest possible proof of our own advancement. Here 
too, lies the explanation of that depravity of our nature, which 
under some form of doctrine, religious teachers of every age 
have dwelt upon. They have been struck with the fact that man 
should be at variance with himself, not acting up to his own 
adopted rule of conduct. That he does frame a rule for himself, 
is surely the first important fact they should have fixed their 
attention on. He, by thinking a law, can, by anticipation, govern 
his future life. That when the moment of desire or passion 
comes, the previous dictate of the reason should be often found 
ineffectual, is what must be expected from the very necessity 
there was to frame a rule. As he learns to think with greater 



540 THE DEVELOPxMENT OF SOCIETY. 

distinctness and power, the rule becomes more effective. But to 
quarrel with our nature because it frames a moral rule which it 
does but imperfectly obey, is simply to object against man, that 
he is both rational and progressive. 

It is the last explains the first ; it is the widest view we can 
obtain of the whole that explains any part of the series. Sup- 
pose those speculations were correct which produce all the varied 
forms of organic life from some one organism — some cell, or 
simplest worm creeping from the hot and moist earth — and which 
produce all the various forms of thought from a few susceptibili- 
ties developing themselves in harmonious union in the increas- 
ingly complicated organism — it is still by their final, full devel- 
opment, you must decide what life is, or what humanity really is. 
You will not ask me to describe the last and perfect type of a 
human society. The very nature of our progress is, that new 
types are developed in the understanding of man ; he is able, by 
increase of knowledge and power, to accomplish new things, and 
thereupon form new designs. I have repeatedly said, that in 
our present state of advancement, I hold that he who desires to 
apply new and imaginary types of society, is a blunderer and a 
mischief-maker. But if the great body of the working classes 
are to advance (through the means I have stated) in prosperity 
and intelligence, a state of society would exist from which new 
social developments may arise, the nature of which we can 
vaguely anticipate. 

My hope in progress breeds no disquietude, no feverish discon- 
tent. On the contrary, by explaining to me the past, it makes 
me resigned to the present. I have known that restless fever of 
the mind to which the speculative man is liable who dwells upon 
some ideal world, very different from that in which he is destined 
to live and labour. I have known this fever, and something of 
its sad results ; it dismembers us from the existing society, it 
disconnects us from the actual community of living men, it ren- 
ders us fractious, weak, and most impotent for any good service 
to that very progress we have at heart. For we can serve the 
future only by rendering good service to our own generation, I 
have outlived this state of mind, I have out-thought it. My 
Utopia is a long way off, and yet, in one sense, it is near at hand. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 541 

sfWe make it as we go, and we enjoy it as we make. It is no era, 
divided off by a sharp line from all other eras. This millen- 
nium of ours — you may descry the dawn of it, if you will, in the 
very dawn of society itself. At least I see the preparation for 
it, as soon as I catch a glimpse of society at all. 

" Are we always to be progressing ? " asks one ; " or are we 
to reach some stationary state ? And if the last, will not this 
be a very monotonous business ? " But what is a stationary 
state ? supposing this to be our goal. Not a torpid or inactive 
one. This last stationary state must be precisely the highest 
development of our multifarious activities. It can only be sta- 
tionary, because the sum of human efforts has reached its climax. 
The subsequent generations live each one in its fullest develop- 
ment of power and knowledge. 

Society cannot be likened to a figure carved out in a rock, 

^ which once carved there, will remain stationary for ever. It 
is always the result of the energetic action of each successive 
generation. It has been more aptly resembled to a fountain, 
which keeps its perpetual form in the air, by its perpetual move- 
ment. 

It needs but one mechanist to give to the whole of society a 
new machine. To make a new and perfect society it needs that 
all should be mechanists. Hence the slowness of our maturity. 
The whole society must perfect itself in the consciousness of 
each individual. 

One often hears a vague talk about a " principle of compen- 
sation." Each age has its good and its evil. Each individual 

)(^ life has its happiness and misery. Some people delight in think- 
ing that the proportions of good and evil are kept throughout ; 
which is a mere hypothesis of their own. 

If any man has formed the ideal of a society, which shall 
include in itself whatever has, at any time, been valued amongst 
men, either as virtue or happiness, I must leave him to contend 
for his own ideal. Such ideal is a manifest impossibility. We 
cannot have the Arab's hospitality in his desert, and the security 
and commerce of a civilized town. Such heroism as shines 
forth by contrast or opposition to a blind and brutal multitude, 
cannot make its appearance in an intelligent community. The 
fullest Hfe, either of one man, or of one nation, cannot be all 



542 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

human life. Progress is not mere addition, or accretion, it is 
organic growth ; at each epoch the whole has a certain com- 
pleteness of its own. Each age has been cared for. The new 
whole cannot be all gain. To adopt the old favourite image — 
even the butterfly loses something that it enjoyed in the cater- 
pillar. We drop as we gather ; and though what we gather is 
better than what the full arm has dropt, still if you persist in 
looking back on what lies strewn upon the road, and irrevocably 
lost to us, you may easily conjure up a sentiment of regret. 

Such sentiment of regret often falls upon the antiquarian 
in his study, and I can partly sympathize with it. But when 
people lay it down as a rule, that in proportion as you have 
increase of good you must have increase of evil, because the 
one is necessary to the other, they are confounding the neces- 
sity of contrast of some hind, with the necessity of this contrast 
of good and evil. Virtue does not necessarily suppose vice ; 
nor pleasure, pain. But no solitary or uniform pleasure can 
endure long ; or rather every sensation lives by contrast with 
some other. But the contrast may be, and most frequently 
is, between one pleasure and another. EiFort and rest are 
both pleasures. The scope for kindness between man and 
man is unlimited, and yet both he who gives, and he who re- 
ceives, may be only passing from one happy state of feeling to 
another. 

You see in a beautiful landscape how the beauty of each 
part is sustained by contrast with some other part. Hill and 
valley — land and water — the plain and the forest — sustain each 
other's beauty, and yet each is beautiful. In the majority of 
cases it is the same with human virtues. Self-denial, tem- 
perance, justice, benevolence, gratitude, may all be exercised 
without implying vice in any other party. Nor is it necessary 
that the kindness which gives us a most exquisite pleasure, 
should relieve us from any corresponding pain or distress. 
Forgiveness of injuries, you will perhaps say, implies one who 
has injured us, but there will be scope for this virtue if we only 
forgive unintended injuries. Martyrs for their faith, and patri- 
ots who devote themselves to death, are heroes, whom we, in 
England, have already willingly exchanged for settled govern- 
ment, and toleration in religion. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 543 

It is lamented by some, that as civilization advances, the 
peculiarities of individual character are worn away. We be- 
come rounded, it is said, like so many pebbles that are con- 
stantly rolling together on the sea- shore. Well, if you look 
at those pebbles, though their sharp angles are rubbed off, you 
will find them rounded into very different shapes. No two of 
them are alike. The fact is, that as civilization advances, the 
varieties of individual character are increased tenfold, are 
incalculably increased, but owing to this very increase, the con- 
trasts cannot be so violent, and happily some extreme types of 
the passionate character may die out altogether. Not only is 
there an increased variety of parts to play in the great drama 
of life, which must entail a diversified development, but nature 
(if we may so speak) never forsakes her old love of variety, 
and we are born with some diversities of constitution, which the 
fuller education of civilized life is sure to develop. What 
shades and contrasts of character may be detected in a single 
family ! How often do we hear the observation, that no two 
brothers are alike. 

Your book, Thorndale, is full, and yet how much remains 
to be said ! — and some great topics — as that of the Immortality 
of the Soul — have been hardly touched upon ! It cannot be 
helped. I ought at least to have left myself space to bring 
together, into a sort of focus, what I have said of Industrial, of 
Religious, and Scientific Progress. Looking back, too, over 
your own Diary, I think I could have brought into harmony 
what seems at first a mere conflict of opinions, and shown that 
every genuine utterance of thought, whether from Cyril or 
Seckendorf, or my poor friend Montini, might have some place 
assigned it in a large and candid view of our progressive nature, 
and the position we, in this century, occupy in the great drama 
of human history. But if any one but ourselves — and the rats 
— should ever peruse this manuscript, he will perhaps take the 
trouble to perform both these tasks for himself — perhaps be 
better pleased that they should be left to his own ingenuity and 
reflection. He will gather together the separate threads of this 
brief exposition of mine, and in his candour he will add to it 
what has been omitted from oversight or want of space. He 
will see how science and the industrial art^ are extending; a 



544 THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIETY. 

prosperous, active, and intelligent life to the millions of man- 
kind ; he will see that men, working from a secure position, will 
be open to wide views of social welfare, will take cognizance of 
the well-being of that whole of society, with which, as civiliza- 
tion advances, the interest of each individual is more and more 
complicated ; he will see that a happy and intelligent life (led 
in a society where men no longer fear each other) will induce 
the cultivated mind willingly and wisely to contemplate the 
great relationship of Creator and Creature, which relationship 
will be found to involve the sentiments of Gratitude, Adoration, 
Hope, and Obedience. 



[Here ends what Clarence has called his Confessio Fidei, 
and here ends our manuscript volume, and our own editorial 
labours. There was not an inch of space left in which Thorn- 
dale could have made his protest against any part of his friend's 
expositions. That he would have dissented from much in the 
Psychological Essay, is plain ; and he would have found some- 
thing to dispute, and still more to add, in that part which treats 
of religion. 

We had ourselves prepared a series of notes to accompany 
this exposition of Clarence's, and the preparation of these notes 
is one cause why a manuscript, which has been in our posses- 
sion some two or three years, has not been sooner published. 
But our own lucubrations increased upon us to a most em- 
barrassing extent, and we were compelled to forego this design. 
We have imposed upon ourselves a restraint not very easily 
practised, and have throughout withheld our editorial sanc- 
tion or disapproval. On some occasions Clarence treats his 
subject in a quite unsatisfactory manner, and on all occasions 
in too brief a manner; but when we made the effort to com- 
plete or correct any of his statements, we found the difficulty 
which he himself has expressed of " filling a goblet at the 
ocean." We wanted space — whole pages where only a few 
lines would have been permissible. The candid reader will 
perhaps bear this difficulty in mind, in forming a judgment of 
this Confession of Faith of our friend, the artist ; he will under- 
stand it rather as a rapid and inaperfect^ sketch, than a finished 
picture. — Editor.] - '^ ^ ^ 









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